


Learn to Fly

by FlightInstructor



Category: DARLING In The FRANXX (Anime)
Genre: Adulthood themes, Cross-Posted on FanFiction.Net, Drama, Gen, Hard Science Fiction, Mecha, Military, Mystery, Psychological, Romance, Society building, Survival, long fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-25
Updated: 2019-05-25
Packaged: 2019-08-07 10:06:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 29,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16406366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FlightInstructor/pseuds/FlightInstructor
Summary: "When we gained our freedom, we never asked what was the price for it."Even at that premise, Goro refused to stand down.A Hard Sci-Fi story picking up from Episode 22 of the anime series Darling in the Franxx. In a barren world, this story follows the Children in their search for a place to call home, and their struggle in figuring out how to fly on their own.Montly releases. Leave kudos if you liked it!





	1. Prologue - Dream with me

 

 

A warm breeze caresses the city park, embedded in the great metropolis in the late afternoon's dim sunset lights.

The deep green grass painted over the serene, small hills shimmers like a field of dancing emeralds while illuminated by the white artificial lamps. Fields of countless meadows surrounded by orderly cut low hedges, trees and bushes and enclosed by stone-tiled walking paths are still full of people enjoying the end of the day in peace and quiet. Couples sitting on benches, children playing, families resting and lonely silence-seeking strollers, all running away from the oppressive city life to pass an evening blessed by the Spring's coming.

At the center of that immense park stands tall a millenarian cherry tree in flower, old as the city itself, it's wide and knobby bark engraved by crevices and washed by humid and mellow-scented moss. The old and majestic guardian of the city shoots upwards his petal-laden branches in the still colorful evening sky. Streams of falling petals constantly fall in the calm wind currents and color the ground of such serene sanctuary, enclosed like a cage by the tree's downward tops, supported by wooden columns and painted red by the last light of the dying sun.

Inside that place, like in a timeless world, a solitary, black shorted hair child lies against the bark of the tree, reading a fable book among the big, sprawling roots of the gigantic tree. Protected from the rooftops of the bizarre, enormous skyscrapers surrounding the park, he was completely absorbed by that beautifully colored story, determined to reach its end.

A pink-haired girl, ignoring her mother's warnings, comes running around the tree and disappears among its big roots, wanting to explore that beautiful world made of fluttering flowers colored like her long hair. Not paying attention to the ground, she trips on a protruding root and slides on the ground in front of the surprised boy, pulling him out from his intense reading.

The girl aches and the boy, preoccupied, closes his book and offers a hand to the girl. She looks at him and smiles, unscratched by the fall, then takes his hand and lifts herself up. They briefly greet, and then she notices her purse spilled all her candies on the ground, so she recoils in surprise and hurriedly starts picking them up to not let them get dirty any further.

Picking the last one up, she turns to the boy who was looking at her curiously and offers it to him. The boy, surprised, shines at her while he accepts it, and asks the girl if she wants to read his book with him. Noticing its beautiful cover, she happily agrees and sits close to him, the book held between the two.

Page after page they lose themselves, amazed by the beautiful images. Then, the fatigue of a day spent playing gets the better of them and they fall asleep, lying their head onto one another, back slouched on the accommodating bark of the cherry tree, resting in that beautiful corner of the world.

That fable book is about a story from a time immemorial.

It crystallizes the sacrifice of the same boy and a girl whose love had no limits in space and time.

Now, for them awaits the beginning of a new story, a new adventure in a time without suffering or pain, in a world that doesn't refuse them or drives them apart...

...fading slowly into pure white.

 

SIMULATION TERMINATED

REM PHASE TRANSITION

WARNING: DO NOT DISCONNECT SUBJECT

Hr: 83  
Bp: 115-81  
C02: 20 mEq / L

MONITORING...

The deep orange dialog box's contours eerily vibrate ever so slightly as it appears fluttering at the center of vision, marking the end of the inducted dream. A deep sigh followed by both hands gripping the side of a virtual reality set. Goro slowly and carefully takes it off his face, trying not to drag his glasses off his nose.

Darkness welcomes him as his maladjusted eyes try to adapt to the dim surrounding light, still dazzled from the bright white he just witnessed. In a matter of seconds, a small and almost empty room comes into vision. Dark walls with no windows greet him, decorated only by the faintly illuminated silhouette of a steel sliding double door. At his feet, a sterile white tiled floor, onto which was placed a big steel structure shaped like a sarcophagus, connected with steel tubes to an industrial wall dispenser inset into the front wall.

Back slouched, Goro is sitting on a chair placed in front of the structure still holding onto the visor with both hands, where he passed most of the night on watch. He groggily pulls his back upright as his gaze slowly ascends and settles on the sarcophagus, fixating on the feeble azure light coming from its top porthole window, shining on the specks of dust fluttering in the room's heavy air.

A moment of hesitation, after which Goro slowly lifts himself up on his feet to walk towards the head of the apparatus, careful to not to pull the wires connecting to the visor. Finding a grated small object tray affixed to the side of the structure, he slides the goggles in it, then his attention shifts on the wide glass window of the metal structure as he slowly leans over to peek the inside.

A girl is lying on her back on the internal bed of the metal coffin, dressed in a white hospital gown, with an IV on her arm. She wears on her head a visored helmet covered by sensors, connected to the bed by countless orange tubes and BUS wires and, protruding from the metal lid of the round helmet, a white hairpin shaped like a bird holding onto her bluish hair, falling helplessly onto the cushion.

Her thin mouth is shaped in a beautiful, wide smile.

Goro's stomach instantly closes as his throat lumps. He diverts his gaze and instinctively forces himself to swallow in an inscrutable frown as he stands there, impotent. Looking into the glass beneath him, the face of a young adolescent straight on the road into adulthood with pointy sun-blond hair appears and exchanges with him a droopy look, complete with baggy eyes under sports glasses on top of an upturned nose, accompanied by an expression deserving nothing less than a moment of silence.

It's the fourth time that the same dream repeats.

He places his forehead onto the cold glass to wake himself up the best he can. Eventually, comes to him the instinct of emptying his burdened mind.

"Are you still there, Ichigo?" he asks to the girl in a low voice. Those words fall unheard, replied only by the deaf buzz of the vents of the metal structure. "You're still wishing their happiness, huh? Even if you're like this..." he still wanders with his soft voice, showing a forlorn smile. "You know, I'd like to have your hope... The hope that the future will give us a place to be happy, no matter where or when..."

Eventually, he shifts off the glass stained by his breath and grabs the metal chair to his back. He pulls it closer and lets himself fall onto it, in front of the encased girl. Complying with his weariness, Goro puts his arms crossed on the sarcophagus' rim as a cushion, on which he drops his heavy loaded head.

"Everything started from there. Two months ago, when Papa abandoned us..."

"It was ' _The battle for a peaceful future'_ , he told us before sending us to death. For us Plantation 13, it was the battle after which we were told we would become free..."

He just can't muster the strength to say how that was... so incredibly wrong.

In slow, rhythmic breaths, his train of thoughts sinks into the darkness, backtracking for the dream he lost on the way there...

 

* * *

  **Prologue - Dream with me -** **END**

* * *

 

**Q) What's Learn to Fly?**  
A) It's, in a sense, a straight up sequel to Darling in the FranXX. It takes place after episode 21, after Star Entity's awakening.

**Q) What is it about?**  
A) It's about Plantation 13 and the reduces of the Second Battle of Gran Crevasse, finding a place to be in the unforgiving and barren world the Adults left behind. The lonely Children will discover what it means to grow up, to take life by their hands and to live a life without regrets, while finding comfort in one another.

  
**Q) Is it really a longfic?**  
A) Definitely yes but progressing one chapter at a time. At May 2019, I have material for 3 proper books' worth. No kidding.

  
**Q) What's the release schedule?**  
A) One chapter of 8000 to 15000 every three to four weeks. This schedule may be unstable because of my occupation, but you will be warned beforehand.

  
**Q) Do you have stable or predetermined ships in the fic?**  
A) No. It's a surprise! Don't come for the slash, come for the plot. But be ready to be slashed anytime. And in very creative ways :^)

  
**Q) Smut?**  
A) This is gen. GEN. G-E-N.

  
**Q) Ow. No sexy time?**  
A) Not on FFN, since I don't want to be banned, but in AO3? Hell yes. Actually, I'd prefer you to search and bookmark Learn to Fly on AO3, since there the site is better, allows incredibly neat graphical stuff that works well with the theme of the story, doesn't have security issues and, more importantly, doesn't delete stories outright. DitF ficdom is in FFN, but I'm of the opinion that starting to migrate towards those places might be extremely healthy. Just drop your email onto the invite request form, forget it for a couple of weeks, then get the ticket to make your account. Easy-peasy.

  
**Q) Will there be Original Characters?**  
A) Yes, a lot of them. They will be supporting characters with full background aligned to my headcanon. The focus will remain on the main cast and they will not take the main role, reserved to squad 13.

  
**Q) Wait... do you follow the established canon?**  
A) A lot of canon things are not set in stone and mostly left undeveloped like a gigantic McGuffin, so for narration's sake, I will fill in the blanks with my headcanon. Yup. Oh, I was about to forget, for me the canon ends in episode 21 included. After that point, no thanks- it becomes Ichigo-tier wish fulfillment. Refer to this chapter and the endnotes.

  
**Q) ...Where is Hiro and Zero Two? Those are the most important characters in DitF! Why are they not the protagonists? What are you going to do with them?**  
A) *smiles* Well... DitF was the story of Hiro and Zero Two. If you want to see more of the same, rehash the same events over and over with some details changed, like the majority of the other fics written so far, or want to see the pairing in the proper spotlight in a happy smutty sequel, this is not your fic. This is Learn to Fly, and this story carries its name and becomes a beast of its own. They will be present in the story and will have prominent roles in it, but they won't the main characters. If you want to leave the main series behind and to get into something new with a different main character roster, a story approach that develops in unforeseen ways topped with mystery, adrenaline and good themes, then this is the story for you.

That's all for now. In the hope I've piqued your interest, have a good reading.

 

* * *

 

**A small rant from the author...**

 

Hello everyone, I'm FlightInstructor, author of this Darling in the FranXX fanfiction, one among other many.

Back in April through July I watched the anime series like everyone else, not really taken at first because of its strange premise:

1) Doggystyle controls?

2) Sexual undertones?

3) -ahem-Pegging?

Man, my sides were already in orbit!

Coming from Houseki no Kuni I just couldn't take this seriously, so thinking it was the usual ecchi action romp I just followed it shallowly while and lurking in the awesome /a/ threads while not watching the episodes... not being interested in everything else (VEG? It felt so pretentious, it didn't poke me the right way).

After some time, the threads became more and more interesting around episode 5, and was in that time that I decided to pick it back up. Then, going forward, the first cour grew up on me faster than I could imagine, despite all of its relative flaws. Then, when the awwi happened, for me it was already AOTY and I didn't regret it.

Until the second cour.

It failed spectacularly in pacing, world building, narration, out of place characterization... the ending could be handled better too, just... it became a miserable pile of unfulfilled potential. Yeah, I'm looking at you too, SAO, although you were that from start to finish.

So, what happened then? I didn't really cry or became mad for the ending, sure it was thematically consistent, but there was a point where  **the story credibility went out of the window**. Logical story progression started to crumble down as themes like the 'Priest King' and it's concepts about fertility, alteration of the generational replacement and the failure of a loveless society started hijacking the story in a... deus-ex-machina way. There was a moment in the series where  **the setting collapsed on itself**  and stopped being about a bunch of growing soldier-kids discovering what is love (baby don't hurt me) in a dystopian society and more towards a make-believe fantasy child story/lucid dream where things happen just because the plot demands it.

But wait, it failed even in the child story department.

"And everyone lived happily ever after!"

"Are you suuuuure, Nishigori?"

It even tried to convey some kind of... moral? Yeah, "Long live natural society"! Praise Abe-sama!

And why going for  **continuity, weight or consequence**  in your story? Well... you know you can't bring the story in any direction without conflict? And I know what's up with that, because that requires drama, an external or internal "something" that makes the characters to move accordingly in a direction, each in their own way. But what if drama affects in-story the chance of a character being hurt seriously, or derails the attention away? What do we do? We have to chicken out of course, because the status quo of the cast must remain stable until the end of the story.

But of course, we want significant drama avoided, so why don't we enforce an  **inconsistent and flimsy support character roster**? The Hir02 drama, inside or outside the FranXX, was what carried the show, but having no real character depth from the side cast lacked the fuel for further personal struggle... so, after episode 15, personal drama was thrown out of the window. It was beautiful knowing about 02 and Hiro and their story... but what happens when their story stops developing? Filler mode, activate.

Ah, and let's kick Futoshi in the butt too, he's clearly made for that, being a mindless FAT stereotype.

And Ikuno is kinda cool, except she's a perfect nobody that stalks Ichigo because she turned a character of her nickname around, solving a very nasty naming problem! That's how you backstory, boys!

And way to go, Goro! You are a perfect saint that places everything above yourself! Right into your element being constantly refused, eh?

MitsuKoko was literally willed by the writer, so let's ask Hiro what should I do about this!

And the poor, cute, nonexistent ZoroMiku...

Yeah I'm sperging out a literal review right now, but this is the passion that has driven me in writing this. A mix of my unbridled fantasy applied in world building and lore while still keeping in mind most of the established canon, real world science explaining story elements and mechanics, fleshed out backstory and character progression for every each one of the characters and... oh, just to drive the point home, there are lots of OCs that have that too.

How about that? Wanna follow my story?

I took a liking to writing, so I'll be around for sure.

 

* * *

 

This derivative Work falls under the **Creative Commons BY/SA/NC 4.0** license. Some rights reserved.

**BY, Attribution:** The readers can copy, freely distribute, modify, rework and remix this Work as far as the original author, 'FlightInstructor', or the title of the Work, 'Learn To Fly' is cited or otherwise appropriate credit is given. Other derivative works including fanart, translations in different languages and audiobooks are allowed. Works of criticism, commentary and with instructional purpose are all allowed and encouraged.

**SA, Share-alike:** The derivative works that are made from this Work may only be accompanied by a **Creative Commons BY/SA/NC license.** The Author opposes the use of a license more or less restrictive than the one provided with the Work.

**NC, Non-Commercial:** The Work and it's derivative works MAY NOT be used for commercial and profit-related activities and may be ONLY used for non-commercial purposes.

The 'Darling in the FranXX' trademark, rights, characters and setting belong to their respective holders. The story of the Work and the modifications from its parent work belong to the Author.


	2. Beneath a Blue Sky

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hello everyone, I'm back!
> 
> After many months of hiatus, I restarted writing in the middle of March and now, having sorted everything I had to do, I'm here to present you the new Chapter 2 in my attempt at rewriting LtF. Slowly but surely, I will get into Chapter 3 to add more scenes and retelling the events in a more acceptable way. Sorry to keep you waiting for Chapter 12, but I need to quickly get into a solid ground to advance the story. After that, I will shed some light on Futoshi's mysterious visions, the true state of Bird's Nest, the adults' fate and the resolution of little pistil's conflict, complete with her backstory and her ponytailed stamen's. Aaaand last but not least... Ichigo's response to Goro's heartfelt confession.
> 
> I'd like to give many thanks to CoCo and others for beta reading this chapter! Looks like I've got quite the writing practice ahead.
> 
> Se you next chapter towards the end of April!

A bright flash of light and a gigantic shockwave, followed by absolute silence.

The explosion tore apart the alien megastructure at the top of Gran Crevasse, flinging its kilometer-wide pieces like shrapnel far into the desertic landscape. Shards made of gleaming violet patterns scattered in the atmosphere and fell back to the earth, tearing the ground asunder and shooting into the air countless grey columns of fine sand. As the winds raged on, they dragged those clouds on the surface of the surrounding desert, the imperfect theatre for the still raging three-way melee between the forces of Humanity, Klaxxo and VIRM.

At the base of the mountain, sparse groups of humanoid robots tall like skyscrapers painted black and orange were panickily forming defensive circles in a phalanx of lethal orange-glowing tipped spears trying to repel the blue mass of war machines surrounding their formations. The wild stampede consuming all around them was accompanied by acute animal-like screams, composing a chilling-to-the-bone scene belonging to the most horrifying of nightmares. Monstrous, lethal, black and neon blue steel hulks of unusual shapes and sizes were erratically and violently stomping their claws against suffocating waves of violet humanoid headless robots falling from the sky like rain, all among volleys of fire and brimstone bombarding aimlessly the landscape from the sky and melting everything they met in their path. A surely desperate but necessary battle, because it carried within the destiny of planet Earth as its utmost prize.

Free from its shackles, Star Entity looked upwards towards the grey sky as its immense figure rose from the destroyed underground complex. As soon as the winds swept away the dust cloud shrouding the atmosphere, all the combatants stopped their fighting in a daze. Their gazes were magnetized in utter awe towards the kilometer-wide peerless mass of metal, slowly rising from the ruins of the Gran Crevasse. In a matter of seconds, a white, red-striped mech with a humanlike armored upper body and a golden plumed, elongated helmet built on top of a religious mantis body with four massive legs was standing tall atop the mountain. Glancing upon the heavy clouds full of tempest with a powerful stance, the machine directed its long blue horn, protruding from its forehead, upwards.

Time froze solid in fear when the horn of Star Entity lit a swirling ball of rotating plasma above its tip. The ball suddenly contracted into a point and, in a lethal glare, released itself forward in a massive beam of pure heat and energy, instantly vaporizing the tumultuous clouds above. Everything was painted the colors of the beam, a glaring blue and red, while another shockwave rocked the earth under the terrifying pressure. Eventually, the glare slowly subsided as the beam shrunk to a thin chord, to then disappear from thin air as bright colors returned to the metallic black, blue and violet mechs carcasses, lit by a shining and gentle yellow sun embedded in the stark blue sky framed by a gigantic hole in the black clouds opened by the weapon.

In unison, all the VIRM humanoid violet mechs stopped moving and fell to the ground like marionettes that had their own strings cut by invisible scissors. Then, a fissure appeared in the arid earth and a giant violet starship shaped like an enormous spearhead took flight from below the Crevasse, trying to escape Star Entity’s fury. The vessel’s flight came to a halt when the kilometer-wide mech grabbed hold of its tail, anchoring it down with its mass to prevent it from leaving Earth. In all response, the ship’s powerful propulsors suddenly kicked off with a shockwave from its four exhausts, slipping off from Star Entity’s fingers and escaping towards the sky.

After a period of hesitation, in which Star Entity stared motionless at the fleeing violet ship reaching escape velocity, it activated its own propulsors to give chase. As she slowly but effortlessly levitated upwards, countless spots in the ground all around Gran Crevasse were torn open by hundreds and hundreds of small blue starships in vertical takeoff, matching speed with the giant war machine in the ascension towards the stars.

At the bottom of the scarred Gran Crevasse human base, beside the border of the giant hole made to contain Star Entity, lay a solitary blue and white FranXX unit half buried beneath the gravel and sprawled on top of a violet VIRM dead unit. After the scorching winds of Star Entity’s propulsors placated, the frontal hatch of the mech slowly opened.

 

* * *

 

I’m still hesitating to wrap my fingers around the orange-glowing emergency lever of the front access of the cockpit, illuminated just by the dim service lights.

The intense vibrations rocking the interior of Delphinium have stopped for a while, so I wonder if the outside is safe as the following silence would suggest, but that sudden deafening rumble made me rethink that scenario… and the health of my eardrums too. Since the panoramic LCD’s power is dead, just considering exposing myself to whatever was happening sends shivers down my spine: a FranXX’s interior is one of the safest places you can be and opening the hatch can be a fatal mistake, so my hand hangs motionless above the lever while I concentrate on my ears to try to pick up any noise from outside.

“Come on, it stopped already. Open up, I want to see!”

I startle as a small hand insistently pushes me from behind… so I sigh.

“…Ok, then.”

I guess it’s time to throw caution to the wind and get a view of what’s happening outside. I plant my knee down and grab with both hands the glowing orange T-lever. With a snap, I tug at it with all my force and my body weight shifts sideways as a help. The mechanism detaches with a «Clack!» and the lever comes off from the base it was lodged into. Following that, a high-pitched pressure discharge from the door’s hydraulic mechanism fizzles into a bass tone. As the sound disperses, the LCD panels embedded into the FranXX panoramic screen releases forward, coming off in the shape of the opening ever so slightly, letting a rim of light into the cockpit’s twilight.

“Well… Stuck?” I ask, puzzled, as I have never had the ‘pleasure’ of using the emergency lever.

“I don’t know… push maybe?”

I follow the advice, planting my hands onto the LCD panels connected to the door and pushing it forward. To my full relief, the frame inclines ever so slowly, letting in rays of dusty light into the cockpit accompanied by an intense burnt and suffocating smell. I cringe in fatigue but keep levering the thick reclining door with my body weight, managing to open it up a little more. It’s with displeasure that, looking through the small door opening, I realize that the entire front face of Delphinium is blocked by concrete rubble - no wonder the door’s so heavy.

After quite a bit of pushing, I can see glimpses of a bright, dusty outside. As the door reclines past forty-five degrees, a bright light forcefully blinds my eyes as I keep tugging. In the end, I jump on it to force it horizontal and steel steps pop up from below the entrance as the door levels with crumbling sounds. It’s thanks to our luck we landed almost level with the ground, because there would be massive problems in even letting some oxygen in… Well, right now the air feels heavy and coarse like breathing magma fuel anyways.

My overexposed eyes slowly adapt to the light. All around Delphinium, an extremely tall and wide circular rock chasm filled with rubble meets my view: gigantic tilted concrete columns in the distance were towering a sea of trashed metal sheets and rocks that composed the walls of the complex, mixed with deep brown earth and spurts of magma fuel coloring everything around them in a glowing orange hue. That landscape formed quite foggy but shiny hills in every direction, interspersed by disjointed and crumpled metal railings climbing towards the top of the chasm like leftover roots of an uprooted tree, casting erratic shadows down below into the sea of rubble. Looking around, I can see swirls of dust kicking up at the small landslides still being triggered in the distance and, more importantly, no sign of the enormous Star Entity.

It couldn’t have disappeared from thin air. Did it explode? Why didn’t the earth explode with it? Are we… dead? No, wait. This doesn’t make any sense. But… where did Star Entity go?

Pulling me out of my daze, the sound of high heels on metal resound from my right side. I turn my head to see a small, blue-haired girl with a slanted bob cut and long bangs pinned to her left temple by a white metal hairpin shaped like a bird. She came walking to my side with a smile on her face. A small body with a slender frame adorned by a tiny chest clothed in a skin-tight body-printed white jumpsuit with blue inserts, a large white shoulder collar made of white polymer holding an LCD screen with full heels on her feet and a folded command interface just below her waist. Her hand passes on her small forehead to wipe the sweat produced by the very difficult situation we were literary and figuratively thrown into, brushing onto her long and thin eyebrows and eyelashes hanging over her deep emerald eyes, petite nose and thin mouth.

Ichigo.

“Looks like we did it!” She cheers while looking around the surrounding desolation.

“Seems like it, but… Where is Star Entity?”

“Ah! Well…” She briefly scans the place again at a loss. She looks up, and suddenly her index finger shoots upwards. “AH! Look! Up there!”

“Uh…? OH, WOW!” Aided by her clue, I raise my nose upwards and recoil in surprise after seeing past the crumpled hanging catwalks. First, I find a bright and clear blue sky instead of the oppressing black clouds I met at the start of the operation and second, a gigantic white and red FranXX-like mech slowly ascending in the air, accompanied by countless gleaming blue dots.

“They did it… They really did it!” I cheer throwing my fist in the air, happy that we won this difficult battle.

“Yes!” Ichigo jumps upwards, hands in the air. “Ah-ahaha! No, we all did it! We’ve saved Earth, Goro!”

I admire her blue hair dancing at his jump and shining like her smile. So blissful. It was all worth it just to see her like this again.

“Yeah!” I nod.

Ichigo lands on her feet and lets out a drawn-out sigh, but then bends down to the ground, aggravated by sudden, fast and unsteady breathing.

“Oi, what’s wrong?” I worriedly ask her.

“Huff… huff… whew! Just a bit tired. We were going at it for hours… I’m going to sit down for a bit…” She brushes it off, then she slowly helps herself down on her knees on the horizontal door, to then spread on her side with a beat-up expression.

“Well, you got that right for me too, Ichigo.” I say, realizing how sluggish my body feels. I sit down on my own to slowly tilt backwards on my back, spreading myself on the metal of the door with my arms behind my head as cushion. Slowly, the circle around my temples disappears and my muscles start regaining a bit of tone. Driving a FranXX is extremely taxing on the body, so it’s normal that after so many hours of driving we would feel tired.

I just can’t shake off the danger we’re still in, though. When we abandoned our post to search for Strelitzia, we also left a raging battle where a violet horde of humanoid mechanical monsters fell onto the battling forces. Now our mech is literally on top of a VIRM unit that followed us and tried to maul us to death: we managed to protect Dr. FranXX and Zero Two accessing the Star Entity entry port by throwing ourselves in desperation into a chasm at the border of the gigantic mech, dragging that thing with us.

Freefalling towards the bottom of the chasm… I thought I would die with Ichigo this time around, but fortunately, the thing cushioned us. Shocked by the impact and crushed by the weight of Delphinium, we manage to pierce at least one of our twin piledrivers into the monster’s body before our FranXX passed out… If we hadn't, we would also be dead. But our luck aided us, and Zero Two managed to enter Star Entity and somehow stop the countdown to self-destruction.

Looking back, that was… Whoa!

“Goro, do you think Hiro and Zero Two are still in Star Entity?” Ichigo asks looking upwards, her head cradled by her arms, pulling me out from my thoughts.

I look upwards to the sky to see the white vapor trail that the gleaming robot has left upon exiting the atmosphere. I almost can’t distinguish it anymore, having become a white dot in the sky.

“I guess…Yes? Wasn’t Strelitzia embedded in it to pilot it?”

“Yeah. But where are they going? Why are they not helping at the battlefield?”

That’s a very legitimate question. Why acquire a megaweapon to then just leave like that? I guess it has something to do with the things that Hachi mentioned before the escort operation.

“Beats me. Are they going to engage the…? What did Hachi call them… S-Starships?”

“Hm. What are starships?” Ichigo asks away.

“Ships were for travelling in water, so maybe… those travel among the stars?” I say embarrassingly. I can’t know everything, I’m just wildly guessing.

“Wow, that’s romantic.”

“Hm? Why?” That was hardly romantic, I think. Isn’t space a lethal void anyways?

“Hiro always liked the stars. In the Garden, he would always read constellation pictures from the astrology books and he knew the constellation names by heart. I wonder how he feels now, being closer to the stars that he has ever been…”

Ah.

“Sure! He always had his nose between the pages of a book. One time, he even ticked a caretaker off having snuck a big one outside the library in the dining room! I was like ‘Hiro, are you gonna eat that, too?’, then an Adult charged into us like a bull!”

“Yeah! Ahahahaha! I remember that!” Ichigo thrills in a relieved laughter. “He got a long-winded scolding that time! It was like, one of the last copies of some animal picture book, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah! He didn’t like rules that much, did he?”

“Nope!”

Ichigo fidgets her hair with her hand clad in her jumpsuit’s gloves, looking up in the sky.

“It’s because of him that we’ve come this far.”

“…”

Indeed. He has always been upfront and had a word for each one of us. He knew a lot of things and wanted to know even more, always driven by his curiosity. He could read people like books, too… I admire him for that quality of his. He knows what you feel and tells you what you need to hear, always caring and having a word for when you felt down. With time, he helped us to think for ourselves and to come to the conclusion that we needed to stand up for ourselves to build a life of our own, without Papa and his… horrible rules.

He’s one of my dearest friends, after all.

“I hope he’s fine and comes back quickly… We need him... In the field.” Ichigo says contrivedly.

“Yeah…”

I turn my head to the side to find Ichigo’s forlorn gaze directed upwards, following Star Entity’s white trail plunging in the immense blue like a dash of white paint drawn from a brush.

You’re still the same… Ichigo.

I wait in silence for some time, then break the silence passing to another topic. “What do you think about what the Princess and Papa said?”

Ichigo turns to my gaze and opens her wordless mouth, only to wander her lost eyes around. After a moment, she comes back to me. “…VIRM.”

“Yeah, Papa… and those things.” I say pointing my thumb to the violet thing behind us.

“Why would Papa turn back on us? I mean… don’t get me wrong, I’d like him to get in a ditch and die, but… siding with aliens? Why? Why suddenly ask help from them?”

I seriously exclude the possibility that he would have done that.

“No… Didn’t they just try to blow up the Earth and us humans with it? I mean, why ask… help from those things? Weren’t we winning anyway? Could it be that, because we lost Star Entity, they suddenly switched sides? It doesn’t make any sense. I think Papa was tricked by those… aliens.”

Ichigo shakes her head at a loss.

“I just… don’t understand anything anymore. Where did they come from? …Space?”

“I guess, since they have starships…”

“And… The Klaxxosaurs had starships too and fought them in the past. When did they…? Our books or at lessons never said anything about VIRM and the war between them…”

“Well, maybe humanity doesn’t know. Then, they retreated inside the planet and… waited silently, as the princess said.” I try to fit the pieces the best I can, but as I finish the sentence, I can’t shake off the sensation that it sounds completely nuts.

“Princess…” Ichigo says pensively. “Do you think there’s a king and a queen too?”

“Well, I don’t know.”

“According to Kokoro’s book, there should be…”

“Ah! Did you read it?”

“No, she just told us what she got from it. The Nines already stole it.”

“Oh, yeah… so it was already too late. I wonder what it told!” I ask Ichigo out of curiosity, and she blushes a little on the cheeks.

“N-nothing too important.” She waves me off, a little on the ropes.

“Hm, I see.” She’s always been a bad liar! But pushing the same button insistently is a no-no for her, so let’s ask something else.

“Thinking about Klaxxosaurs… we were stomping on their kingdom all along.” I reflect a bit. “I guess they weren’t that happy about it, about us stealing… The magma and the cores from underground.”

“Yeah. and our Delphinium… is made from a Klaxxosaur.” Ichigo says with a deadpan tone.

“Ah. That…” At that worrisome statement, my voice hangs in the air as my gaze falls to the ground. Apparently, we had the revelation that our FranXX is a Klaxxosaur repurposed for humans to pilot, and until then we knew nothing of that. That thought was extremely alienating: the place where Ichigo and I connected our minds together was revealed as something very different than what I thought. It felt almost like a part of myself betrayed me and became something foreign, hostile.

“To me, that changes nothing. It’s OUR Delphinium, the same one that we’ve driven ‘till now.” Ichigo decisively declares to me. “It has always been something special to me. And you’re my partner, Goro!” She lifts from her side and shouts pointing at me with a very serious attitude. “The BEST partner, Goro!”

Wow! You’re very forward today! And, of course, completely right. It doesn’t matter where our FranXX comes from. Even for me, it has always been the place where our minds, our lives and our destinies were embedded and intertwined into… So, I want to declare from my heart something that has been stuck in my chest from too much time.

“…You’re right. It’s the most special thing in my life…” But my feelings don’t end there. They go deeper than this. “…And you are, too. I couldn’t live without you.”

Ichigo’s hard expression melts at my declaration, taken completely by surprise. She blushes vigorously as her sure-of-herself attitude crumbles in pieces and starts fidgeting with her fingers. After a moment, she recomposes beaming a reddish smile to me.

“I… Thanks, Goro. That was… beautiful to hear.”

“No problem. Anytime.” I say smiling back.

“Hehehe!” She chuckles while bringing her gaze away in the distance, fixing it somewhere while focusing her mind elsewhere. With extreme satisfaction I do the same, stretching my arms behind the back of my head on the clean metal of the door. Admiring the dust swirls up above, I feel the air much cleaner thanks to the air currents rushing to fill the now open-air chasm. My chest goes up and down in relaxed long breaths while I follow the vapor trail of Star Entity’s curving and tapering into a thin point, smaller and smaller in the high sky.

Why didn’t I do this earlier? Am I a moron? Well, just a tiny bit. I kind of already told her, but this time it’s a bit different. Around the time of the explosive Klaxxosaur I was… vague. I threw the word ‘Love’ around too freely, without knowing what it really meant. And by that, I mean what «deeply» meant. I've had some time to think about it, so it’s time to apply yourself, boy!

The wind howls at the bottom of the newly formed wide canyon, bringing a warm pre-summer feel. Even with the echoed sound of the various rock landslides in the distance, I just imagine it’s like that day at the beach, the warm sun hitting my face through my glasses while the sound of the ocean’s waves washing on the sandy shore… That day, it was so blissful, free of any weight and responsibility, detached from the horror of this war, the fear of the enemy, the sorties, the klaxxosaurs, the adults, Papa… I wish I would be in that place again. With also 200% more swimsuit Ichigo.

Slowly but surely, after daydreaming for a while, my mind returns once again to my real surroundings and goes into stress, feeling like a hefty weight is placed on my temples. Way to ruin a perfect moment, Goro. Well… I guess we don’t have to wait for Hiro to return to evaluate our situation, as every second we pass here without fuel is one where we’re not able to defend ourselves. What happens if one of those VIRM soldiers comes over to search for his missing friend?

“I hope Argentea, Genista and Chlorophytum are fine.” I say while getting up from a sitting position, feeling my muscles still a little slumped.

“They better be! Otherwise I will be furious!” Ichigo interjects, showing a frown.

“Oh. Being showered with worry by our magnanimous and thoughtful team leader sure is hard!” I jokingly jab at her, thinking I’d rather fight a thousand VIRMs than put up with her bad side.

“S-Shut up, Goro!” She pouts, jolting upwards and inflating her cheeks like an owl and staring me down with her eyes squeezed. “I really mean it!”

“I worry too, but I’m sure they are fine.” I explain while stretching my legs and arms, preparing to get myself up on my feet. “Trust them. We’re the lucky ones, since we were the ones about to go empty mid-fight. I don’t need to say what would have happened then.”

“…W-What if they did go empty before us?”

“Ichigo… don’t think about it. For now…” I launch myself forward in a squat, then I pull myself up and turn towards the cockpit, clearing over the door’s frame while explaining. “…I’m gonna call Hachi to give our situation report, ask what’s happening around us and request evac. After that, I will ask for our squad’s status.”

“...” Ichigo nods at me while tracking me with her worried gaze.

Going happy-go-lucky is one of the worst approaches to hard decisions, after depressing yourself. For this reason, I must contact Hachi and tell him about our predicament, not without first shedding some light about the battle around us since he’s the acting Commander of the mission. Doing so, we might stand a chance of returning all in one piece from this hell of a situation and dispel our worries about our squad. We left them when we were engaging the VIRM soldiers on our tail to rush forward and complete the mission as fast as possible and we haven’t heard back from them since.

Entering the cockpit, I circumvent the central interface to proceed to my post, an open seat to the back of the room. I slide onto the seat’s puffy cushion and look at the side of it, where I find a see-through small openable panel. Inside it, I hit one of many physical switches labelled by tiny engraved letters saying: «Backup Power».

Lights all around the cockpit flash on with a bass hum vibrating its frame. A tiny laser button keyboard appears on the transparent panel’s top, that I close back shut. After tapping a laser button on it, a blue holographic screen appears hovering above the surface of the unlit panoramic screen straight in front of me, accompanied by a holographic keyboard with a full key layout wrapping around my left side like a hook in front of me. Keeping my hands suspended above the keyboard, I type out the call command to the mission’s high command.

The black holoscreen morphs into a blue «Outgoing call…» with the elipsis flashing, in silence.

I hope the call pulls through even down here. Instead, the screen shuts off with a «Call failed».

“Damn.”

I retype the command, and the screen once again shows an «Outgoing call…» message, this time accompanied by my dearest wishes. I can’t waste the auxiliary power like this. This time, after some seconds, the screen fluctuates and a «Online from Gran Crevasse High Command» appears at the bottom of the screen.

“Yes!” I cheer.

“Are you through?” Ichigo asks from outside.

“Yup.”

The screen continues to flicker, then a silhouette of an almost bald man stalks on the screen among the gray static noise of the video feed.

“A…w…ffff…fffffffff… can yo-you… rec…v…ffffff…”

“Hachi, I can’t hear you. Signal’s weak.”

“I se-fffff…fff.. swichin..fff… to anoth…er ant…ffffffff…na.”

The silhouette moves his hands and a «Redirecting call…» message appears floats on it. Then the screen flickers on resetting the call, and a much clearer but still jaggy image of Hachi filled with static appears.

A bluish brush cut over thin, long and serious eyebrows crowning thin, elongated and expressionless light-brown eyes. Between them a protruding, straight and flat as a board nose towering on his clear olive face and diamond chin and thin mouth, angled in a slight frown. In a gray-to-black skin-tight uniform with golden epaulettes highlighting his thin and fit physique, a red sewn-in short tie hangs below his high neckline. He’s Hachi, our field commander.

“Greetings, Code 056.”

“Hachi! I’m relieved to see you! Mission completed?”

Hachi’s expression rests as he nods slightly forward.

“Yes. We can sign off the mission as successful. Earth is saved.”

“Wheeew!” I sigh while abandoning my back against the stamen’s seat and the weight on my temples disappears like my brain has fallen out from my head. “It’s nice to hear that! While bringing Zero Two and Dr. FranXX at the entrance of Star Entity, we were almost taken down by one of those VIRM units…”

“I see. I wasn’t sure myself of the mission’s success until the last moment, too. Star Entity was about to explode that the structure around it collapsed.”

“I-I guess that’s because Zero Two and Dr. Franxx managed to enter the gate, rescue Hiro and pilot the thing.”

“Yes, fortunately. By the way, your signal’s not optimal, I can’t triangulate you. Where is Code 015? Is she uninjured?” Hachi asks away.

“Yessir.” Ichigo comes inside, as anticipated by the clapping of her interface heels onto the main deck of the cockpit, walking around the pistil’s seat and stopping beside me facing proudly the holographic screen inside the picture of the camera. “Status is ten by ten. Although, our unit Delphinium is not operative and needs immediate support.”

“I see. What’s your situation?”

“Ehm…” My eyes dangle left and right and eventually meet Ichigo’s. After exchanging an embarrassing furtive glance, my eyes shoot away to the side in shame.

“What’s the problem?” Hachi presses on, slightly collapsing a brow.

“…Remember the VIRM unit I was referring earlier? We… threw ourselves down the chasm… dragging that thing with us.” I shamefully explain.

“Ah-” Hachi freezes on the spot, uttering monotone moans with his mouth open. “Wh-”

“And… we managed to cushion ourselves with it, and then disable it. We’re currently out of fuel, on top of said VIRM unit.”

Hachi blinks several times, fixating in a daze his dull eyes on my face, as if he were expecting me to utter ‘Just kidding!’.

“…On top of…?”

“Yes.” Totally on top of it.

Hachi still stares us down flabbergasted, but eventually his eyes blink and his head slightly shakes in order to regain some composure.

“So, repeat to me where you are.”

“At the bottom of the chasm where Star Entity was docked, and… I guess close to where the access port was.”

“How far down does the chasm go?”

“Quite a long way… maybe kilometers. The walls of the chasm didn’t fracture, since it looks like those are made from compressed rock. The surroundings are… mostly a mess of rubble, steel scaffoldings and collapsing ruins.” I vaguely explain.

“That’s… extremely inconvenient.” Hachi slowly articulates, regaining his ability to think. “I guess those are what’s left of the complex built around Star Entity. That justifies the disturbed connection. But that’s beside the point: how am I supposed to get you out of there?”

Hachi lets his gaze wander for a while, and I follow his eyes bouncing left and right around the screen, maybe looking at others beside the one he’s talking through.

“Why? Are there any problems with the rescue teams…?”

Hachi parts his sharp lips, but his voice hesitates to come out from his mouth.

“I… can’t manage to contact the ground or aerial support operation center at Bird’s Nest.”

“Wh-what? What does that mean?”

“I-Is everything all right with Bird’s Nest…?”

Even after a full year of being under his command, this is the first time I’ve seen Hachi as uncollected as this. He would always be calm, stoic and calculating like the embodiment of a commanding figure. Now, his vaguely lost expression lies hidden in plain view under a fake emotionless demeanour, and I feel I’m in turn mirroring his uneasiness.

 “This operation is under my responsibility. I hailed ground control and no one’s responding while there’s no reason why they shouldn’t.” Hachi promptly recomposes himself while shaking his head at the - I guess to his eyes - absurd situation. “From the data gathered here, Bird’s Nest was not attacked… The Gran Crevasse long range communication systems must have collapsed when Star Entity woke up… then, I see no other way. The only option left is to… solve this another way.”

“What about the battle? And the rest of my team?” I promptly ask away.

“The battle is dying down. The enemy forces have stopped fighting, from what I can see. I’ve not yet contacted anyone besides you two. About your teammates, I can still track their movements, so they are probably operational. I’m going to contact them as soon as we end this call.”

“Ha…!” Both me and Ichigo exclaim out of relief. “We’re glad.”

Hachi nods. “The units on the field also need immediate help, so I’m returning to Bird’s Nest at once with the means I can manage. As soon as I’m in range, I’ll give order to send the rescue teams and coordinate a medivac mission. For now, stay inside the cockpit and switch on your location signal. Since your position is not in range of any landing zone, I’ll send out a ground team to your rescue. Just keep your energy consumption low and the signal will remain strong for them to receive.”

“Yessir!” Both of us respond in unison.

“Any questions?”

I look into Ichigo’s eyes for confirmation, “I guess not. Orders received, sir.” she immediately responds.

Hachi’s eyes go off focus for a moment, fixating a point outside the screen in a pensive expression. Ultimately, after a brief reflection, he unceremoniously ends the conversation with the same stoicism he greeted us with.

“I’ll be off, then. Over.”

Hachi’s unstable image flickers as the screen switches off, leaving behind a ‘Call ended’ in light blue letters. It’s with a long-drawn-out sigh that I pull my back against the cushions of the stamen’s seat and relax my shoulders.

“We’re set now. We just need to wait for resupply.” I confidently state while summoning once again the keyboard and typing out the command to activate the radio beacon used to mark our FranXX’s position. The screen confirms to me ‘Locator signal: ACTIVE’, so I hit a virtual button on my right, close to the access panel, and the caption changes into ‘Safe mode’, switching off the keyboard and dimming the cockpit lights so that only the dusty brightness from outside can outline my surroundings. It’s with a light fit of uneasiness that this scenery overlaps in my mind’s eye with the scenery of the battle we just witnessed.

The disorienting confusion of the air filled with sand and screams… so much screaming that my spine was almost fibrillating at the number of cold shivers that flowed into it. Glowing blue sprays of Klaxxo blood mixed with the orange color of magma fuel from our companions’ FranXX, which were crushed left and right amidst the uncontrollable panic of the klaxxosaurs being mauled by the violet mass of the VIRM forces dropping from the sky. Among them, fearful and crying human voices from the comms were begging and calling Papa in vain, then abruptly went silent one by one. In the distance, columns of fire descending from past the black clouds instantly melted everything they landed on - one landed close by, cutting a worm-like klaxxo in half like it was butter, causing it to writhe uncontrollably and scream in unfathomable pain. It was just less than an hour ago when I, Ichigo and my team detached from the defence squads at the base of Gran Crevasse and abandoned that… massacre.

Perhaps unconsciously guided by fear and the desire to run away from that absolute horror, Ichigo ordered our squad to abandon our post and to return inside Gran Crevasse. Acknowledging we didn’t have a chance without Star Entity, we went back to investigate what happened to that ‘supreme weapon’ we were told about, which was supposed to be driven by Zero Two and Hiro on Strelitzia but was then trapped in some sort of cocoon and rigged to explode. Fighting our way back to the command station, it was with shock that we learnt from Dr. FranXX and Hachi that Hiro was abducted by the ‘Klaxxo Princess’ and Zero Two narrowly survived being thrown out of the cockpit, even if gravely injured. Due to a completely hopeless plan from Dr. FranXX, we helped them reach the access port to the back of Star Entity, but midway we were forced to split into two groups, one to hold back the VIRM attackers and the other, me and Ichigo, to quickly bring the doctor and Zero two to the entrance. So, we did, at nearly the cost of our life.

And now, here we are.

Speaking of ‘we’, what’s Ichigo doing? Glancing to my left, her silhouette is still standing where I left her. After talking with Hachi, she just stood there without a word, immobile like a statue with her head reclined forward. … Is she ok? I shift closer to her, trying to get a good look of her, but her eyes stay nonresponsive even at me bending over to try and decipher her look.

“Ichigo…?” As I call to her, she flinches awake and briefly gives me a frightened look to then divert her gaze away, making me stutter. Those eyes are no good. “Is… everything…?” Her lips clasp shut as she straightens her back trying to look strong, but her hands along her sides give away a slight tremor.  Why am I even asking? Nothing’s alright! You know you can’t hide something like that from me, Ichigo.

“Ichigo, everything is going to be fine.” I sport the most confident voice in me possible. “We’re going to make it. The battle’s over, nothing stands in our way anymore! We are free!” At my retort, she tries to look at me in the eye, but she can’t keep her glance straight.

“B-but, what do we do now…? A-and then…? What about Papa, what if he comes back for revenge and…! W-what if the rescuers abandon us here…? I-I’m…” Her unstable voice trills with fear as her shoulders slouch ever so slightly, making her smaller than her tiny frame ever allows.

No, no! Don’t be like that, Ichigo! We’ve not come this close to freedom in our entire lives! We can do this, I’m sure Hachi will return with help and everything will straighten out in the end! There’s no avoiding it, just looking at her in this state distresses me to no end. I’m just barely resisting the urge to… touch her and… make her feel that I’m close… I don’t want her to feel afraid, I want her to feel safe with me!

“Don’t be afraid, Ichigo!” I can’t help but shoot up from the seat and grab both of her petite shoulders to affirm my presence onto her. In a wild response, her eyes widen while her mouth comes loose completely taken by surprise by my bold behaviour as my hands hold onto her frame, feeling the shivers and the distress of her muscles.  “I’m your partner, I’m here for you, I swear! Even if something goes wrong, I will be with you and we will take care of it! Together we can do everything, remember? This time too!”

Her eyes lock onto mine, still full of a mist of surprise, fear and confusion, but slowly her shoulders come loose and her eyes slowly mellow. As her breath slowly calms, she silently stands there letting my hands steady her body. But then, it’s with my surprise that she suddenly launches her arms forward and throws herself onto me embracing my sides with strength. Completely thrown off by her, I slowly reciprocate by wrapping my arms around her bust, to pull her closer to my body and to lay my cheek onto her bluish hair as she lays hers onto my chest breastplate. Even past our suits made of carbon and the stiffness of her collar interface, I can feel the inebriating warmth of her body and the contact of her delicate skin onto mine. In response, my heart goes wild and my mind goes almost blank. Is this what Hiro and Zero Two felt?

Is this… how it feels like when you embrace someone… you love?

“Goro… thank you.”

I cannot respond, as I’m absolutely, completely cathartic. The only motion I can afford is my left hand caressing her back. Nothing more. I just want to stay like this forever. Seconds, maybe minutes pass and our embrace doesn’t seem to cease. We just stand there, our bodies against each other with our eyes closed while protecting against the cold air coming from the cockpit’s entrance and hiding ourselves from the dim light coming from the unknown outside. I want so strongly, with every inch of myself, to be with her forever.

Then, a whimper.

“Ichigo?” I detach my cheek from her head and see a single tear descending onto her face. What’s… happening? Another one, falling straight into the soft blue padding of her collar. And another… She detaches from me immediately as she realizes I’m staring at her and tries to cover her eyes in shame. “Why…?”

“I’m… I’m… sorry…” She scuttles backwards, almost like she wants to fade away. While covering her teary emerald eyes, she runs past me clapping her unstable heels onto the cockpit’s frame to quickly runs past the cockpit’s door. She just plumps down on the reclined door of Delphinium’s face while holding her knees tight with both her arms and burying in head in between, still crying and giving me her back.

I try to reach for her, but my hand stops mid-air with my throat lumped. Just as I couldn’t speak before, now I can’t say anything either, but this time, my chest feels like… a big cave-in just collapsed inside it. Is this… my fault? Did I do something wrong? Did I hurt her? How…?

No, it’s not like that.

I fall back onto the stamen’s seat as waves of anxiety take me. I know perfectly well what this is, I don’t need to lie to myself. This is not just about me and her, there’s someone else that she cares about more than me, and I can’t do anything about it. But… nonetheless, I won’t stop. I’m sure that if I keep trying hard enough, I can become someone that she cares that much about, too. I know that there’s a place for me. I’m sure of it.

Now, if only my chest would stop hurting, and my mind would stop thinking…

 

* * *

 

Mute tapping sounds echo in the unlit status room next to the base of the mass access elevator of Gran Crevasse spanning several kilometers from the surface. Alone, sitting on an egg-type roller chair and bent over onto the black surface of the long and slanted command console, a tall man with a buzz cut in a formal futuristic officer jumpsuit frantically taps onto the bleeding orange fonts and graphs that rapidly morph and flicker on the terminal.

After a last decisive tap on the keyboard, the megascreen mounted on the top of the console refreshes and a bright orange map of the Gran Crevasse human base comes onscreen, casting an unnatural hue onto the cracked tiled walls of the room. On top of it, the caption ‘PERFORMING SYSTEM DIAGNOSTICS…’ intermittently flashes while countless small windows appear all around the circular map displaying a fast stream of bright red monospace error messages. One by one, the main sections of the map turn red at the center, orange at the borders with some green external parts at the outskirts of the complex. After nodding slightly, he inputs further commands and a reticule appears onto the green part of the complex, zooming in on the single details of the section.

“Do you still work…?” Hachi questions the screen.

After some more tapping, the bidimensional map transforms into a 3D projection of a cylindrical well connecting the outside with a single long tunnel cutting into Gran Crevasse. At the bottom of the vertical tube labelled ‘Heavy duty access elevator’ lies a solitary room with a ‘You are here’ placed into it. To the side of the picture appears a long list of green entries detailing the still functioning systems and a stable graph giving a positive reading of its power grid.

“Good, at least I can leave this place.”

Hachi sighs briefly, then rolls the chair over another part of the console, where his fingers once again slide onto its black smooth surface to bring up a long list of orange contacts. With a flick of the index, the digital entries quickly flip through the screen until the finger stops at the entry labelled ‘UNIT ∷ ARGENTEA’. It’s after a decisive tap on it that the status description of the mech unit appears: cryptic codes, oscillating graphs and a ParaCapacity level visualizers flash onto the console’s surface, accompanied by a black framed camera feed with a wildly fluctuating mess of gray pixels.

“Well, that’s what I have to work with.”

Slowly, after some flickering, the black window reveals a mute, static-filled real-time feed of the FranXX cockpit while being piloted. From the aerial camera’s view comes into sight a scrawny kid with brown unkempt hair in a deep-blue jumpsuit yanking the controls attached to his pistil, a red headed girl with twintails, completely unaware of being watched. On the internal walls of the cockpit, the projection of the outside view shows the duo tending to a sitting white and violet FranXX, accompanied by another black one with a tall cap and a bulky appearance. Tapping onto the image, a menu appears to the side and Hachi presses the call button and instantly the camera switches to the side of the cockpit, at the surprise of the stamen who jumps on his seat.

“H-huh‼ Hachi!” The stamen shouts with an uncouth voice while recognizing his commander-in-chief’s figure abruptly appearing on his side on a holoscreen.

“Greetings, Code 666. What’s your status?”

“W-we’ve got an injured here!” He frantically points towards the white and violet mech. “Ik- ehm, Code 196 is not feeling well!”

“I can see that. Does Chloropythum need medical attention?”

“I-I don’t think so, I mean…”

“Can they move?”

“Yessir! I think…”

“Then, priority task to all the remaining squad members capable of moving their mech: return immediately to the high mass elevator.”

“Aaah? What…?” An incredulous, robotic voice of a girl suddenly exclaims out of nowhere from the comms. “What about Delphinium? What about Star Entity??”

“We made it, the battle’s over.” Hachi announces without hesitation, but his voice urges onwards with an upbeat version of his usual monotone. “I’ve got an urgent communication for Bird’s Nest air controller. I must give the all clear for the support units to begin the MedEvac operation as it's my duty, but the long-range antennas of the base are not functioning properly. To solve this problem, the plan is to get to the surface and use the high-powered antenna integrated in your FranXX so I can relay the order. This is of the utmost importance. Adding a waypoint to your navigational computer.”

“Y-yes…” The boy bats his eyes in surprise at Hachi’s unusual, but mesmerizing machinegun-like verbosity and only the breaking of Hachi’s relentless eye contact unlocks him from his daze. Having given the commands to send the coordinates to the unit, Hachi once again glances at the young pilot.

“…Here. About your teammates… I just contacted Delphinium and they are uninjured, but their unit requires a fuel resupply immediately. As soon as you come here, I’ll explain the rest. Be quick, the units on the field can’t wait for much longer either, there are many injured stamens and pistils that need immediate assistance. You’re the acting squad leader until Delphinium is recovered.”

The boy’s eyes and mouth widen dramatically at the surprise title he’s been given on the spot but, after realizing the gravity of his task, he boldly straightens himself in a formal and proper salute. “Ye-yessir! We’ll be there as soon as possible!”

Hachi nods, “I’ll be seeing you shortly, then. Over.”, as the communication switches off. Hachi silently stares at the internal cockpit video feed of the boy returning with extreme glee to his controls distorting into a mess of pixels, until disappearing into a ‘Signal lost’.

Hachi keeps staring at the static on the screen for a minute until his hands cup onto his mouth and his elbows shift onto the console, slumping his back forward with a brief sigh. He knows that in this emergency he’s walking on a razor’s edge and his decisions, if managed improperly, can have horrible consequences on the ones under him. It’s in these moments that he would expect to feel something more, but instead there’s only the usual vague mist of something amiss, an unexpressed animosity without name, a slight unconscious pressure. With all those things happening in a short span of time, another person would have collapsed under the anxiety, but not him. His mind was made… different. Very much so.

“There must be something more I can do.”

His eyes lose focus as his mind conjures up various possibilities and scenarios: the battle, the injured, Star Entity…

“The doctor.” Hachi suddenly jumps from his chair. “Is he fine…?” His hands launch once again onto the console, selecting the personnel tracker and searching his contact on a similar list to the one previously checked. He left the doctor to be transported by Delphinium’s team, and Code 056 did mention delivering him at the access port of Star Entity, but that was all. After he reached the weapon, did he manage to survive the collapse of the base? The main console screen now flashes with a planimetry of the base with a ‘Searching…’ caption accompanied by a rotating progress icon. After a moment, the caption changes to ‘Target not found’.

“Of course, there’s no way there’s enough signal to reach his tracker.” Normally, a VIP like the doctor wouldn’t be this close to the front lines. Actually, the entire Gran Crevasse complex was evacuated days prior to Star Entity’s awakening and left managed by the automated systems until the aftermath. The only human staff left on the station was supposed to be him, acting as tactical commander-in-chief for the forces on the ground, but the Seven Sages ruled that the presence of the Doctor was a necessity to have the chance of successful activation closer to 100% as possible. Still, Hachi wishes for the Doctor to be safe until the arrival of the rescue teams, relieved by the fact that all around the complex there are kinetic-resistant emergency pods ready to use.

“Ok, ok. Now… rescue operations.” You don't just call aerial rescuers and expect them to do all the work in the world. They consist of large transports of medical equipment and staff, engineers and drones to crack open the cockpits of the busted units and that’s all. They can’t delve into the carcasses of the enemies because they lack heavy lifting capability and, more importantly, they need a landing zone to get situated. An LZ too far away is useless because of the long travel time, and one close by is impracticable because of the danger of stragglers and the lack of space. But… in the right conditions, Hachi thinks that arranging a close LZ is still possible. And that would be the task of the ground forces, the FranXX.

“I need to contact the surviving units on the battleground- but first…” His mind is dead set on an option that is the only logical one in that situation, and his fingers once again slide over the contact list of the ground forces, but this time in order to close it. Aiding himself pushing on the lid of the desk, Hachi rolls his chair to the other side of the console where a control terminal used for controlling drones lights up. After some more tapping on the screen, a list of unmanned observation drones pops up, but its entries suddenly paint red, making Hachi frown slightly.

“Mhn- all downed. What about the meteorological ones?” A more populated list appears, and more red drones are listed except for three green solitary ones. “Gotcha. They are a bit far, but at least their antennas are online.” He selects the first one and its navigational data appears on the giant screen, along with a wide view of its turret camera.

Suddenly, Hachi gets up from his chair and rolls it to the side pushing it against the backrest. With it out of the way, he walks to the center of the room facing the physical main screen. His eyes stare one at a time at its two integrated side cameras that silently exchange his gaze as if they had a life of their own. Hachi then straightens his back and raises both his arms level to the floor pointing his index fingers at them.

«Beep!»

After the brief sound prompt, his indexes light up in an orange glow. Then, in a controlled motion, Hachi opens his palms and shows them to the cameras spreading his fingers apart. Another sound plays for confirmation after which, on each of his hands, a holographic orange reticule shrouds his fingers accompanied by a holoscreen locked at the side of his wrists.

«Full Gesture Interface active», a profound electronic male voice announces as the lights of the room dim, with the monitors remaining the only light source available. Hachi’s hands move with controlled precision as his fingers and thumb make the gesture of grabbing the screen’s corners. As he drags his hands apart, the drone’s video feed pops up from the physical monitor and enlarges doubling in size while floating in mid-air in front of him. After that, his arms level once again in front of him and his fingers form an L-shape, which touch each other lighting up blue. In a single motion, Hachi parts both arms and the holoscreen enlarges and distorts into a sphere, shrouding him in a 360° projection of what the drone was currently filming.

Hachi rests his hands along his sides. Now, instead of being in a dark tiled room, he’s floating several kilometers in the air from the vast, earthen deserts overlooking Gran Crevasse. Apart from the slight jitter due to the altitude currents fighting with the drone’s rotors, a crisp and clear bird's-eye view of the complex appears before his eyes. A completely dead landscape filled with droughted earth mixed with fine red sand and interspersed with blades of eroded rocks expands in every direction. At quite the distance from the drone, the terrain’s jagged features culminate into a tall mountain capped by a kilometer-wide exploded dome. In concentric circles around the complex tower the melted or disabled Klaxxosaur’s orbital defences consisting of, from what appeared when they were alive, giant plasma casters that returned fire to VIRM’s invading fleet. Between those, lies immobile an unending blue and violet river made of dead Klaxxosaurs and VIRM units circling the entire complex.

“What…is that?” In a fit of surprise, Hachi squints his eyes towards a single earthen-brown empty spot among the sea of carcasses. Considering the utter chaos that ensued in the battlefield, it seemed extremely improbable that a perfect circle excavated itself between the corpses by sheer chance. That was surely an anomaly… quite the odd one.

Hachi points to that strange spot with his index and a reticule appears in front of the finger, from which he makes a frame gesture and parts his hands diagonally. The picture zooms extremely fast like following an arrow through the air and stops just above the landmark, showing it was a truly perfect circle made of… Klaxxosaurs and… wait a moment.

“What went on there…?”, Hachi asks himself in disbelief. And that question was clearly warranted, because the carcasses outlining the circle weren’t arranged like that by themselves but were literally mauled and gorged as if they were triturated in a blender. The open space measures at least half a kilometer in diameter and, on top of that, shows completely tidy and immaculate ground - the problem is that we’re talking about mechs hundreds of meters tall weighing a thousand tons, so one look at those behemoths would tell you the earth couldn't simply remain intact. Instead, at the center of said space lies a single human FranXX unit, in particular a mass-produced one, solitarily half-kneeling against its long orange spear planted down in the ground and held high. Tragically immobile, the mech has the presence and the solemnity of a defeated warrior in a won battle, similar to the ones depicted in those monuments that humanity used to dedicate to the wars of the old world. Hachi is rendered utterly speechless at that sight. Flicking his wrist onto the FranXX, a nametag appears next to it.

 

 

 

Unit: Solidago. ★

 

It has a star next to it, meaning it’s a team leader unit. Hovering on his wrist, the holographic display updates and shows the data of said unit, still completely operational and with an hour of fuel left. Even just the presence of that information indicates that the low-power antennas all around the complex are still functional.

“Good.” Hachi notices its battered armor and wonders about the status of the crew. Dragging his fingers aside, the display shifts to the FranXX’s remote controls. Using these, Hachi switches to the internal camera and the scene shifts inside of the cockpit. Or at least it should be, because complete darkness suddenly engulfs him. The unit is fine and the crew’s life metrics are nominal, so what’s up with this? Why are they in…

“Sniff- augh- sniff…”

Hachi freezes on the spot. A muffled but painful sobbing noise of a girl plays from the audio feed among the tomb-like silence of the cockpit. Unable to get a clear vision of what happened, he fumbles with the controls on his wrist and increases the exposure of the camera. A white hue washes the image and reveals two silhouettes, one abandoned on the stamen’s seat grabbing his head and the other lying in a fetal position between the pistil’s seat and the panoramic screen. Hachi lets his mouth hang open, unsure of what to do. Of course, they’re… shocked about the battle, aren’t they…? Nevertheless, Hachi needs their help immediately, so he turns on the communicator on sound only and starts to talk.

“Unit Solidago. Commander on air, requesting status.”

Hachi’s lapidary request jerks the stamen from his torpor, who slowly reaches blindly for the control panel and, after some groping around, switches the main light on. Suddenly, Hachi's eyes squint uncomfortably as they are assaulted from the bright overexposure of the camera, making him reach once again to dial down the settings on his wrist. The stifled light reveals a relatively tall boy, maybe 17 or so, with curly black hair on a square jawed face and straight nose, not showing injuries of any sort over his dark blue body-printed overalls ranging from the neck to his interface boots. Only detail out of the ordinary were his bloodshot and teary brown eyes, grabbing Hachi’s attention while wandering to the side to meet the ‘Voice only’ holoscreen at his right.

“This… is… Code… 371. Team… leader…” He fumbles his own words in a chocked voice while his thin eyebrows squint uncontrollably. Then, his wide lower lip tremble as he forces a gulp down and resumes his still unstable voice. “Ahn… Team leader of… Squad 103. Condition nominal… s-suffered… minimal… dam…” The boy grasps his mouth fighting a gag, then resumes with a small tear crossing his cheek. “…damage.”

That’s… not true. Hachi takes a moment to size him up properly, because no one in their right mind would say ‘minimal damage’ at that sorry spectacle- why even give a false report in that situation. Did they suffer from strain feedback, since they are… probably responsible for their surroundings? Actually, the thing is that they wouldn’t know if… well, never mind, whatever happened, it’s not important now.

“Received. Just a reminder, if the crew is injured, perform first aid immediately. Physical health is a strict requirement to drive a FranXX unit.” Hachi regards him stoically. “When you’re ready, I have a task for you. While scanning the area, I’ve found that the clearing around you is suitable for a landing zone for the MedEvac and Unit recovery. Since the support will be inbound shortly, I ask of your squad to help with the evacuation, give aid to the downed units and regroup all their crews at your position with adequate first aid support.”

“Y-ye-yessir…”, the stamen responds with less voice than before. The boy starts to look around almost in a panicked state, with his eyes wide open and his breath taking over like his lungs are trying to escape through his throat. The pistil girl, still rolled on her side giving the camera her back, starts sobbing silently and shuddering with her hands on her face covered by her wavy goldenrod hair. Hachi glances at both, then realizes something’s amiss. Something critical _he_ missed about the situation.

“…What’s your squad’s status…?”

The golden-haired girl’s sobs transform into high-pitched howls, “Ihhhgh- hic - ihigghh… ihigghh…” as her voice starts to morph into a lament of pure pain. The boy’s face, among his companion’s chilling screams, crumbles and contorts with pure guilt as tears start streaming down his cheeks.

“T-they… are d-dead… All… of… ‘em…”

Hachi freezes on the spot, as if washed by a cold shower, as the boy abandons once again on his seat and drops his gaze to the floor to try to wipe off his tears with little to no effect. His mind was taken by the words the boy said to him, so his eyes bounce back and forth between the two young parasites afflicted by their painful mourning. After his mind recovers from a mist of confusion, his mouth opens compelled by a vague urge to say something, anything in order to console them.

But his voice wouldn’t come out.

To his surprise, he couldn’t think of anything to say, bringing more and more confusion to his head. He just didn’t catch up to the fact that, before being soldiers, they are young children, and they just survived the most difficult battle of their lives. He had been so focused on Star Entity and the sudden emergency of its capture, leading to an eventual destruction of Earth, that he left unattended the forces on the ground. He left them to their fate both as commander and as caretaker. It was the most he could do in that situation, and he knew that: if he had the chance to redo it, he would choose to do the same. In that moment he had to choose between the destruction of Earth and the FranXX squads on the field, so he chose the former. He felt to do what was… logical at that time.

Now, confronted with his own choice, he feels completely worthless. But his chest doesn’t bulge or despair. It’s not that he doesn’t want to care about what happens in front of him, quite the contrary. Hachi is witnessing their pain and acknowledging it in his mind, but he ultimately doesn’t understand what they’re going through. Because… since he was born, his mind was made different.

Throughout his life, he wouldn’t know what a smile or a tear meant.

Looking at those two young parasites on the brink of despair, he really wants to find those words that would make them feel better, give them hope for the future and give them the strength to pull through that giant hurdle. But, in the depths of his empty heart, he can’t find words fitting the purpose, so he curses himself in silence. He may be the best field commander of humanity, but that doesn’t amount to anything if he can’t do the things that matter to him the most. As those thoughts cross his mind, he finally resigns himself to his uselessness.

“I’m sorry.”

Those simple words mostly pointed out his failure as a caretaker, but in that situation, they had a bigger effect than he thought possible. The boy and the girl slowly stopped crying, leaving just a trail of grave breathing and a forlorn atmosphere misting the silence of the cockpit. After a while, the stamen sits back properly and wipes his face, this time revealing a gaze in acceptance of the situation.

“It’s not your fault, commander.” After saying so, he gets up from the seat and slowly moves over to his companion, grabs her shoulder and shakes it gently. “Come on, we’ve got a task…” he softly tells her, but the girl lies still on the floor, unresponsive, so the boy keeps shaking. “We’ve gotta do it…” he keeps whispering.

“I don’t wanna…” the girl protests in her strained voice. “It’s too much…”

“We owe ‘em… to not be abandoned here…”

“Sniff- Ehhh…” the girl groans in protest, but then lifts her shoulder from the cold steel of the cockpit’s floor and gets herself sitting with the help of her stamen sustaining her by her side. She reflexively lies the side of her head on his breast plate, giving away the desire of wanting to stay like that. “…Just a moment, ok…?”

The stamen looks around to see he’s not being watched, then drags her closer. Hachi sees the scene unnoticed, as he’s connected to an internal camera without giving away his presence. And, most importantly, without letting out a word. His mind is fighting very hard not to interrupt them consciously, as his professionality would have reprimanded that unlawful and unwarranted physical contact on the spot. But, in that situation, Hachi thinks that it’s his own shortcoming that created that situation in the first place, so he’ll… allow it. For now.

“I’ll be unavailable for a time. I’ll be contacting you shortly. Don’t leave antenna range and… keep safe.”

“Yessir.” both parasites respond in unison. Hachi glances at his wrist and the command screen pops up again and switches off the audio communication. Seeing that both are still in each other's arms, he shifts the view outside the FranXX wanting to give them some privacy…

“Thinking more about it, Papa and his rule are most likely gone.” Hachi makes a note in his head that he will have to get in touch with the rest of the officers and persuade them of the situation, most likely giving a copy of the telemetry data from the battle with the video feeds and a battle report attached. Scratching his chin, his mind is dead set on the mission he’s been waiting to accomplish all this time. At that thought, the strange sensation on his chest subsides just a little bit, the right amount to signal that life onwards will not be the same. After clapping his hands twice, the wraparound immersive screen and the holographic hand interface disappear and the black room with the shining orange console returns to the eye.

“If not, I will make sure of that.”

 

* * *

  **Chapter 2 - END**

* * *


	3. Battlefield

Deep down underground, close to the border of the earth's crust, spans the massive and dark service corridors of the underground complex of Gran Crevasse. A maze of interleaving dark hallways separated by control rooms, unloading bays, reactors and orange fuel tanks, all devoid of a single human soul. Save for one, where a relentless hammering echoes from behind a tall hydraulic steel door close shut between two sections of a magnetic rail system made for transport. What seem like heavy metal footsteps slowly get louder and louder at the other side of the blast door. Suddenly, a robotic laughter vibrates the walls.

"AHAHAHA! I've made it! I'm the team leader! Did you hear everyone- TEAM LEADER!"

"What are you on about!?"

"SUPREME TEAM LEADER! It's about time that I'm rewarded for my abilities!"

"Stop shouting with the external speakers, you idiot Zorome! Also, hold that thing right there! Hachi said Argentea is the team leader! That means ME! And what are those abilities you're talking about?? All you do is flap your mouth open endlessly! HARDLY what a team leader does!"

"You don't go on blabbering, Miku! I was talking directly to him! And if Hachi appointed me himself, you'll have to acknowledge the-fact-that-I'm-the-best! I'M THE BEST! I always knew it!"

"Shut the hell up, I said! I'll acknowledge you after I'm dead!"

Suddenly, the loud footsteps and voices come to a halt.

"Oh...? Is this a dead end...?"

"HAH! Look at the incompetence of the supposed team leader, everyone! Already leading the squad to ruin right away? You should resign and give the role to someone more ACCOMPLISHED! HOHOHOHO!"

"Ah- shut up! It's your fault! You're in the FranXX, you should have told me!"

"Aaaah? That's not my task, you loser team leader, if you can't even read a tactical map from your comfortable stamen seat! SOOOO DISGRACEFUL!"

"L-lies! The map said the corridor is longer and then... then there's a crossing... and...!"

"Heh! I know it, you're just a lost child without me! Stop complaining and look here!"

A pause, then... «BAM!», two sets three orange glowing-hot claws pierce into the hydraulic door. The metal of the door sharply fizzles and cracks from the blades' extreme heat.

"Haaaaah!"

The talons slash downward in an arch, leaving effortlessly white-hot cuts in the tempered steel like it's butter, then retract and slash once again across the door connecting the other tears in a triangle.

"HA!"

With a violent impact, the cut section is loudly smashed off the door and its pieces ends up rolling across the other side of the fully lit corridor among a shower of hot metal splinters. Past the still glowing borders of the triangular hole shine a couple of bright lights, and a white and pink robotic face hovers between them. Featureless apart from a stylized mouth, a small nose under a pair of round glasses seemingly painted around a pair of curious aqua-green stylized eyes peeping from the dark.

"Whoaaaa! It was a door?!" an uncouth and genuinely surprised male voice exclaims from the floating head.

"Finally light!" the face says while morphing into a complacent grin. Argentea reels backwards, then jumps with agility through the scorching hole and lands graciously into the light, revealing her full extent.

Tall slightly less than a hundred meters, Argentea is a humanoid mecha with a very feminine appearance. Landing on a single high footless boot with a slight metal rim at the top, her jointless white-and-purple striped legs slightly bend forward to the knee's height to easily sustain the energy of the jump. Both legs quickly recover and widen as Argentea boldly straightens her slender and violet back with a "Hmpf!" in superiority pose, leaning her white cylindrical clawed gloves onto her white hip armor resembling short jeans. She throws out her sleeveless white chest armor made by a thick and high collar that comfortably houses her head.

"See? I made it! Who's the TRUE team leader now, HUH?", she taunts Zorome with a naughty and at the same time complacent attitude. The human features of Argentea don't stop there: past the black neckline, finds his way a diamond shaped chin from which start two short antennas that cover the mech's cheeks. Above her white face, her heart-shaped head culminates in a pink helmet decorated by an aqua-green tiara and, on the sides of her head, extend two u-shaped long antlers resembling obtrusive twin-tails that arch to the side and make her little show-off all the more hilarious.

"Hmpf! ...Not that bad, Miku. You can be my second in command." A condescending male voice comes from the vibrating discs inset into the sides of Argentea's helmet.

"Agh! You little...!"

But suddenly, "Oh, come on both of you, stop this! We need to get to Hachi!" a  low-pitched but slightly immature male voice coming from behind cuts her off.

"What do you want, fattie?"

"Hey! Watch your tongue!" the deep voice aggressively barks, "Ikuno doesn't feel well! I don't want her to get worse because of you're wasting time bickering. Get on with it!"

"Whoa, calm doooown Futoshi! Your team leader has things under control!" Argentea says as she turns around towards the hole to contain her teammate's manifest impatience.

"Thanks, Futoshi..." a mature but feeble female voice moans past the door's hole.

"G... guys," Another shy girl's voice coming from past the hole begs between insecure stuttering, "h-how about we go on...? I'm s-scared of this place..."

"Sure, Kokoro."

Argentea closes up to the hole on the door and removes her cylindrical right glove, trapping it between her side and her other left one, then extends her freed arm back trough the opening she created. Shortly after, a white mech's hand with five slender fingers slides forward to grab the pink mech's shoulder. Tilting herself backwards, Argentea slowly drags out the rest of the forearm, a long pauldron with purple rims and long metal rods shaped as wings attached to its side.

"Careful, carful!" a deep bark warns again Argentea.

"Geez, I'm doing my best, Futoshi!" Miku complains back to him.

After some careful movements, a long white and violet armored shoulder slides past the hole, followed by a head surmounted by a white almond-shaped helmet with an orange gem on its top, a long violet iron plume mounted on its back and two sets of wing-like antennas built on the cheeks. A single teal eye shines through the purple visor integrated on the front of the helmet, squinted and vaguely trembling behind some long curved metal fins resembling curvy bangs coming out from the top of the visor.

"Good Ikuno, now get up the leg slowly... Watch the rim..."

Clasping her lips displayed on the faceplate, the mech lifts her left leg and clears the still glowing-red hole. Slowly, a white leg shines through it as the newfound light reveals, at the end of it, a long orange spike acting as a foot made of the same material of Argentea's claws.

"Uwwww..." Ikuno's voice comes off strained as the leg touches the ground and the other follows through, unstably shifting the balance to the former. But, despite Argentea's help, the orange spike supporting the mech's weight slides onto the slippery metal flooring.

"Oh-!" The purple robot grapples onto Argentea in an attempt to remain balanced, but the sudden movement takes her by surprise, "Nononono! I- can't-!" and drags her companion towards the ground.

"Chlorophytum!" A panicky male voice breaks through the hole past the door and two black mech hands wrap around the unstable mech's frame halting her fall just above the heat of the molten steel. "Watch out!"

"I'm- pant... - sorry," Ikuno apologizes, " I can't feel my FranXX's balance..."

"Genista, on my three we lift Chlorophytum," Miku shouts, "one, two, three!"

"Hop!" With a synchronized effort, the black colored FranXX props up Chlorophytum from her armpits while the pink one drags it through the still fiery hole in the door. Past the danger, Argentea puts her sitting onto the ground with a metallic thud. "Ahh! We made it!"

"Damn..." Ikuno curses with the last sliver of her breath while reaching for her FranXX prominent chest, belonging to quite the feminine figure of Argentea, only crucially different detail of her design is that she resembles a winged ballet dancer instead of a roller-skater. In fact, a belt of steel magazines floats around her hip like a frilly costume skirt.

"We should let her rest," another male voice declares, more noble-sounding than the one belonging to Chlorophytum's stamen, comes from the black mech still at the other side of the door. A white faceplate with long and soft-looking metal sheets recalling blond braids peeks from the hole with wide violet eyes and a small mouth. Over her head sits a really obtrusive black shako helmet with big acid-green ear protectors,

"Mitsuru... I want to say yes, but- owww, my head...- Hachi said w-we don't have time..." Ikuno explains while massaging her FranXX's helmet. "If it comes to it... please, go on... without-"

"No way!" Mitsuru, Kokoro, Miku, Zorome and Futoshi immediately shout her down in unison.

"Ikuno, what are you even thinking...!" Futoshi says incredulous.

"We're not going to leave Chlorophytum here! Leader's orders!" Miku states in a definitive manner, above Zorome's grumbling reaction.

"D-don't worry! If it comes to it, then Genista's gonna carry you!" Kokoro says while the black mech shows her clasped black mittens stating her willingness to carry out her intentions.

"A-ah..." Ikuno forgoes her intentions in a sigh. "OK, then... I'll be in your care. Sorry..."

"Argentea, I need a hand!" Mitsuru calls the mech's attention. Genista crouches past the hole, then resurfaces holding what seems a massive black-and-acid-green revolver-styled gunlance with an orange bayonet affixed to the end of its long barrel and hands it over to the pink teammate.

"Ah- sure!" Zorome and Miku respond in unison, then Argentea comes closer to the hole and, after affixing her clawed gloves on her hip armor, grabs the bulky rifle by the carry handle from Genista's hands and carefully gets it through. With a "Ouuuf!", she slowly and carefully accompanies the weapon on the ground. "How do you even fight with this...!" Miku protests still bent in two.

"Now, I-I'm gonna jump through!" Kokoro declares as Genista pats her black armor - more similar of a bell-shaped black overcoat ending at calves' height with squared shoulder protectors. Past the solid parka made of metal sheets, her bulky moon boots' tips nervously tap the steel ground as Kokoro takes the courage to follow through her words. "H-h-h-ere we go!"

"Ah- wait, Kok- UGH!" Mitsuru tries to stop her partner, but his words abruptly end in a grumble and Genista takes a run up to the door anyways.  She skips through the door in a very girly jump with hands and legs tied together, and the triangular hole is conveniently made for her body shape to pass through. But alas, the upper section of the hole isn't shaped as her high cylindrical helmet.

«BANG!»

"WHAAAAAH!" Genista's high cap smashes onto the upper rim of the hole and, retaining the momentum from the jump, the mech backflips and slides face-first through the corridor at top speed, only ending her travel after grinding a large crevice onto the flooring. The top of the hole is now deformed by a severe bump onto the thick steel.

"Kokoro!" Futoshi screams in panic.

"Owowowowwww!" Genista grabs her cap now reclined backwards showing knit blonde hair and shoves it back upright, then proceeds to rub out the squinted-out frown painted her faceplate. "Awww! That hurt! I thought I could do it!"

"Jeez, could you just had climbed it slowly like Chlorophytum did? You're such a klutz sometimes, Kokoro. Good that it was just your hat and not the cockpit." Miku says as Argentea approaches her teammate and pats her black shoulder armor.

"I-I'm sorry!!" she panics while trying to explain herself, "I just saw you do it and... I just went and jumped..."

"Heheh..." Ikuno's weakly chuckles between her teeth from Chlorophytum.

"It was my fault too." Mitsuru interjects with a "I've said Code 556's name and... I just didn't manage to stop haer."

"N-No, Code 326, I'm the one at fault... I should had been more careful... I'm the driver..."

"Weeeell, two casualties on your first team leader's day! How's that feeling, Zorome?" Miku jabs at his partner out of the blue.

"Hmpf! We're two, aren't we...?"

"Oh, nice! That's the closest I can make you admit to it. Can you stand, Genista?"

"Yes. I guess I don't feel anything wrong after all." Mitsuru says as his black mech stands once again with her shoulder guided by Argentea. "Well, you're very agile in your FranXX, Argentea."

"That's the point of my design, is it! Fast-and-hard!" Miku merrily says as Argentea shadowboxes into the air under Genista's big-eyed stare.

"Sure it was a while since we learned how to drive," Ikuno adds while Chlorophytum carefully props herself up on her knees, "but I still feel a bit clumsy about it."

"That's not true, you're not like that at all! " Futoshi objects to his partner's devaluation. "You've just strained yourself, Ikuno, don't be unfair...!"

"Hhm..." Ikuno weakly grumbles as Chlorophytum's only eye saddens.

"Now that you mention it, this is the longest we've ever been inside our FranXX," Mitsuru duly notes. "I guess this is quite the special occasion, huh. We don't have much fuel left, so we'll better hurry."

"Come on, Ikuno, up we go!" Kokoro merrily asks her teammate while Genista grabs Chlorophytum by the armpits to assist her to get upright. In response, she arches her arm around the high collar of Genista's armored poncho and proceeds carefully along the lit corridor.

"Thanks..." Ikuno says as the only eye of her FranXX mellows.

"Argentea, could you carry my Sparrow Rook? I've got my hands full." Mitsuru asks as Genista glances back to the horned FranXX.

"Aye!" Zorome heeds his teammate's call and Argentea hurries to grab Genista's long rifle from the transport handle and jerks it back up with both hands, not without a theatrical "OOOF!" and following the other two down the corridor while wobbling left and right due to the hefty luggage.

The FranXX trio continues the walk into a long-spanning hallway made out of white steel plates painted by multiple color-coded arrows, marking the service paths the now missing service crew used to transport the humongous pieces of Star Entity during it's construction. Along the walls of the corridor, mules of many sizes and shapes and long heavy duty transport trains were orderly left abandoned close to human-sized elevators. That's one of the many evacuation pathways that were supposedly planned, Ikuno noted.

"These ones were really in a hurry," she concluded observing an unusual group of transport vehicles that were piled onto each other like bumper cars gone wild.

"Those carts are so small up here!" Zorome happily takes notice with superiority while Argentea bumps one of the carts with her finger, big like said vehicle. "They look like the toys I've had at the Garden! Cool!"

"Were you used to play... with mini cars?" Miku asks.

"Huh, yeah? What about it?"

"Hm, I thought you liked to play with the ball."

"Just because those runts won't shut up on how they were good at it! Seriously, I wanted to teach them some respect!"

After the brief interruption, the group resumes their travel and reaches a series of crossroads with air windmills rotating on the ceiling interspersed by twists and bends. Having learned the right path by heart, Miku and Zorome drive their FranXX in front of Genista and Chlorophytum while still carrying the former's weapon.

 While periodically stopping to check the right way among the intricate web of the underground Gran Crevasse, Zorome learns that the map has multiple interconnected layers of corridors and halls, divided by several hundred meters of solid rock, at which bottom extend magma extractor pumps plunge to the depths of the earth.

"This place is... massive. How could Papa build this in two months from when we conquered it?" Miku asks while walking.

"Well, of course, I think that if Papa can build Plantations, then it's not that far off that he can build even bases like this... I guess." Futoshi suggests. "Also, weren't the Adults helping?"

"Yeah, Papa was extremely powerful... and the adults too!" Zorome says with a sliver of naivety.

"Powerful...?" Ikuno wonders, "Yes, Papa had the technology, and the adults the knowledge to use it." Ikuno's recites her thoughts aloud, but then her tone starts to aggravate. "He made everything. The plantations, the FranXX... and even us. But even then, if Papa would have been all-powerful... that wouldn't had mattered in any way." Her voice falls in a whisper.

Papa, the absolute ruler of Humanity. He led what remained of human civilization against the invincible monster aggressor that leveled all the world's cities to the ground and caused millions upon millions of deaths. Since Ikuno was born, she was told that the hopes of Humanity were placed on them, the FranXX drivers, and that they had to give up their life for a brighter future. One where society wouldn't have to hide inside Plantations, gigantic roaming city-fortresses made of steel and traverse the earth like tormented souls. But, at the lasts of said crucial moment, when victory was at hand, he betrayed humanity and sided with VIRM, some otherworldly force that came out of the blue and slaughtered everyone indiscriminately with the intention of stealing Star Entity and, by extension, the future that humanity sought for.

Ikuno feels a twisting sensation inside her chest. The same one would feel if lied since birth.

"Why? Why throwing it all away like that? What was the sense of everything at all!" Ikuno's voice suddenly mounts with anger, "What's the sense of it all? Could any of you tell me what was our sacrifice worth for??"

Both Genista and Argentea suddenly stop on their tracks, startled by Ikuno's outburst, and turn to look at Chlorophytum's only eye, now tinged of a reddish hue.

"Why when you get close to the future humanity was promised, you just throw it all away? Why would you do that?? WHY!!" Ikuno screams at the top of her lungs, making the floor vibrate under the pressure of her voice projecting from her FranXX, still hanging from a startled Genista.

"It was... our future, too..." She sobs.

Ikuno's words grind to a halt in front of her teammates' vacuous expressions, that slowly morph into regretful glances at the sign of her eye trembling with static noise. Their helpless stares drop to the floor acknowledging the meaning of Ikuno's anger but unable of saying anything useful to explain their current predicament.

An empty silence falls into the equally empty corridor, then Kokoro takes point with an observation. "We were... never explained the hows and whys of many things..." she tries to put it vaguely, and Mitsuru picks up from her.

"Yeah, since we were little, we were never told how things were, just what we would have to do for everyone." he contemplates at his own words, then continues. "But I think this is the time to ask the same questions again. And I'm not going to accept a 'no' ever again. Not after today."

"Nice said, Mitsuru! We've been led around in circles too many times! I want to know it all! No excuses!" Futoshi ramps up with a grave tone.

"I guess that we'll have to reach the top first. When we're done with this situation, we'll ask the rest." Mitsuru concludes. Meanwhile, Chlorophytum parts slightly with a worried Genista and tries to balance herself on her pointy feet, then lets go of her former walking aid. She takes a steady walk towards Argentea that greets her with a smile.

"Hm. I feel better now." Ikuno says while discovering that she can keep her balance way better than before. "I think I can walk by myself from now on."

"Oh! Do you feel we can try hovering mode?" Futoshi asks her.

"Yes, I think I can manage." Saying so, a sudden jet of compressed air comes from both of the rims built around Chlorophytum's knees from which begins the orange of her pin feet. The strong air current travel down her feet like an aerospike thruster and gives the mech the lift force to detach some meters off the ground.

"Nice!" Zorome exclaims as the white-and-violet winged mech pulls a pirouette in midair without effort.

"Ikuno! You're good to go then! Thanks to this, we're gonna get there in no time!" Miku cheers while Argentea runs to Genista to unceremoniously deliver back the black gun she was carrying. She takes the lead and points forwards. "If you're ready, then let's hurry! Hachi and everyone else is waiting for us!" Saying so, Argentea engages her own thrusters at the soles of her legs and transitions to a hover like her teammate.

"O-oh! I'm joining too!" Kokoro activates Genista's hover thrusters too, and the strong whirlwinds created by everyone's scatters away the orderly lined transport carts all around the corridor, smashing them like toys against the walls under Genista's guilty squeals.

"Wh-whatever! Those were not cool. Forward!" A disgruntled Zorome yells and, one after the other, the mechs propel down the endless corridor towards the mass service elevator.

 

* * *

 

 

Bright images flash before Hachi's peeled eyes in the dim lights of the command room.

The entirety of the battle's recording fast-forwards on the main console display in multiple screens, each one of them detailing the points of view of the observation drones. His irises dance erratically left and right onto the data readings displayed with or ange fonts to the sides of the picture, a continuous stream of information detailing the events that transpired during those moments.

Hachi taps onto the wide console terminal and a tactical holomap appears hovering to the side of the screen. A wall green dots is visualized in a bell formation around the circular shape of Gran Crevasse, when to the left of the map a wave of solid blue contacts streams towards the center. The humongous mass of Klaxxosaurs is intercepted by the FranXX ground forces clashes like a raging river contained by a dam. As the charge is contained, slowly but surely, some of the single green dots that were taking the brunt of the assault turn bright red among vague muffled screams heard from the recorded open comms.

 

Unit Lophira: connection lost.

Unit Badilloa: left arm critical damage.

Unit Anthemis: connection lost.

Unit Triadenum: detected cockpit breach.

 

Hachi's eyes remain cold and calculating, but his hand reflexively clenches his chair's armrest. The aerial cameras show the moment the blue wave dead-stopped onto the line of FranXX units and receded slowly as black and orange towering mechs desperately thrusting their spears forward to contain the blue horror materialized in mechanical monster form. The battle raged on as, one after the other, the blue nighmares' cores popped one after the other among blue liquid explosions, leaving an ever-growing mountain of defeated Klaxxosaurs at the base of the human defense line.

The battle was going the right way, but then, the catastrophe came.

The awakening of Star Entity and the descent of the violet drop pods from the upper atmosphere, then Papa's possessed voice thundering on the comms announcing his traitorous declaration, followed by a stream of foreign contacts popping up everywhere. The new enemy took surprise both sides and the head-to-head encounter became a confusing melee as violet-colored small robots without heads smashed their stumped hands onto the broken human defensive line and proceeded to kamikaze themselves onto the mass of blue Klaxxosaurs. Among electrified explosions and plasma orbital bombardments descending from the clouded sky, the most hellish spectacle unfolded before Hachi's trembling eyes. One by one, the screens of the observation drones go static as they are systematically shot down and the event log starts going crazy.

 

Unit Justicia: core critical failure.

Unit Quercus: detected cockpit breach.

Unit Muraltia: connection lost.

Unit Hovea: leg damage detected.

Unit Helicrisium: magma tank critical failure.

Unit Diospyros: crew damage detected.

Unit Carlina: arm displacement.

Unit Quercus: crew damage detected.

Unit Ancathia: crew damage detected.

Unit Ancathia: connection lost.

 

The list was updating faster than his reading capabilities allows him to follow. The orange fonts flicker quickly pass under Hachi's eyes detailing the injury of each unit on the field, among muffled and ever-increasing laments and screams. Eventually, his hand flings forward to pause the recording.

"Haahh... Hahh..." Hachi's breath painfully escapes him. An enormous pressure is crushing his chest like being at a kilometer under the sea. Hachi grapples his head and silently slides his elbows onto the console, among nervous gasps for air. Eventually, his breathing stabilizes, and his hand retracts back while his gaze solders to the paused wall of screens filled with gray static with a 'signal lost' red caption. But, even if the pressure subsides, all that's left is just a hole where the heart would have been...

Hachi clenches his fists and, guided by a strong impulse, jumps up from the command chair and walks straight towards the exit, only to grind himself to a halt midway to the door.

"...Where am I going?" he asks to himself. But the answer wouldn't come up. "Am I... running?" He marvels to his own instincts while staring at the metal tiled floor. "Why...?" He lost control of his body for a second, like something urged him to run. Run far. Farther than anyone and anything, and never come back.

"What... the..." He starts pondering seriously if he has something wrong in himself. That was the first time he ever commanded a full-scale battle and he didn't realize fully what that battle was like until he watched it all with his own eyes. So... why having that urge? Isn't it his duty to be the best commander he could be? To be with his Parasites till the end? To learn from his experiences and losses, and all...? Maybe it was impossible to prevent. Maybe... it was one droplet too much for him. After all, he was completely impotent in front of something horrible while he had the responsibility to prevent it.

Once again.

"I wonder if things are going to change at all." Hachi, although, is pretty sure there are things that are just not going to change, no matter how much you desire and work towards it. His gaze elevates to the white ceiling and, after a brief moment of recollection, faces back the screen hands joined to his sides.

"Command: close playback."

A deep, robotic male voice coming from the console answers him back, and the gray hue from the previously destroyed drone cameras dissipates to show the recording backup interface.

«Playback closed.»

Hachi walks back to the console and scans for the last time the data entries of the battle report and, deciding it was all in order, makes to grab the cylindrical memory unit embedded into the console. But, at the last moment, something slightly strange picks up his attention.

"Wait... why is this entry so big?" Hachi noticed with his side vision an entry in particular that was called 'Weather' and was several terabytes big, not quite the data dimension of the forecasts he would expect to see in a normal report. "Why are you like this...?" he wonders.

Quickly recalling his vast experience, the automated report systems' job is to compile a humongous amount of data and then pack them in human-readable formats called battle reports.

In particular there are pre-battle reports, where an AI gets the most data possible from sensors, to foe detection and databases of previous battles to compile prediction models of everything pertaining the battle: from geological activity models to predict the class and numbers of Klaxxosaurs joining the battle, weather models for windage artillery corrections to precise health readings of the pilots to preemptively determine their performance in battle, ending with a probability map of the attack pattern of the Klaxxosaurs. That's the one that Hachi based his strategy on, and was - mostly - correct, apart from Papa's betrayal chance, that was listed as 0% both in the report and in Hachi's head... Not really, it wasn't listed in the report, but he does wonder if, with some AI training, he would had the opportunity to add it.

After that, the in-battle report is the one he had just ended witnessing. Video recording, logging, telemetry data, all provided by the observation drones and optical devices disseminated in the valley below. The report goes as far as the life of the drones lasts, as seen on the screens, and some meteorological drones were definitely still up when the battle ended since Hachi used one to scan for a landing site.

"Command: show timeline." Hachi asks with authoritative tone.

«Timeline mode.»

Before him, a scrollable horizontal graph with the events of the battle appears hovering in front of him. He gestures left to right to scroll towards the last moments of the battle and finds that a lot of data was recorded minutes before the end.

"What are you...?"

His fingers expand that section of the timeline and a floating picture opens. A solitary ground camera placed on a distant crest of rock was left untouched and recorded the distant silhouette of the massive complex of Gran Crevasse.

"Star... Entity...?"

He focuses the picture on the humongous metal mech arising from the complex, looking at the sky, then igniting its bright blue horn. Hachi parts his fingers to zoom onto it at maximum level, then slows down the recording in order to being able to see what's that all about.

"It's a plasma weapon, isn't it?" Hachi tries to guess the nature of the weapon, comparing to how it was used before, when the Princess took control of it, briefly before being encased in the VIRM containment shell.

"Command: read event log."

As he finishes the sentence, the computer answers him back.

«Voiceover active. Abnormal atmospheric heat detected.»

"Indeed. Terminal air compression inside the horn. Generates heat, that creates plasma that is cast my magnetic force at high speed. Maybe the heat was what triggered the drones to record the event in the first place."

A fiery ball of plasma slowly forms at the tip of the horn and starts rotating slowly at first, then the momentum accelerates at breakneck speeds.

«Gravity contraction detected.»

"...Huh?" Hachi slightly furrows his thin brows. "...Why would you need to...?"

Like anticipated by the second tooltip, a light distortion due to gravitational lens forms around the gas ball, that accelerates until it's not possible to tell if it's rotating or not. The gravitational lens becomes immensely powerful and warps the light all around it like being inside a glass sphere. Then, the ball of fire reduces to single, minuscule point, compressed by the immense bounding force of the artificial gravity. The camera is washed white by an intense glare.

«Fusion reaction detected.»

Hachi's eyes open wide.

"...I didn't get a memo about this."

Hachi flicks his fingers and changes to the IR thermal view, detecting inside that little point a total of a million degrees and rapidly rising.

"This isn't a plasma weapon. It's a particle beam weapon."

The ball contracts some more, then the gravitational lens distorts at the top, parting at the top of the sphere. The hyper-compressed air is released in a flash. A light lance ascends the sky, piercing the clouds above that instantly vaporize, accompanied by countless lightnings crossing the black veil, leaving only the blue of the sky at its place. The beam accelerates upwards in a narrow cone and melts instantly everything that isn't a FranXX or a Klaxxosaur in a radius of kilometers above ground.

«Planetary atmosphere escape detected. Radiation readings increasing.»

A satellite view of the Earth appears next to the little camera's, showing the narrow heat wave of the beam depicted as red, and the atmosphere of the planet as a blue circle. The air layers in contact with the beam are literally dragged off Earth's gravity influence and shot into space. The VIRM sky armada, parked in geostationary orbit above the complex, is engulfed by the red cone. One by one, the contacts of the starships disappear on screen under Hachi's petrified expression.

"...Star Entity." Hachi articulates its name with absolute doom.

Now he knew why it was called in such a way.

The immense power of the stars. Inside the ultimate life form.

The definitive war machine. At humanity's fingertips.

Before, Hachi was extremely confused about the sudden appearance of VIRM. Not about their existence, because if you are born in an Earth filled with Klaxxosaurs, the concept of alien life existing along humanity is decisively the norm and widely accepted.

It was about what they wanted. As the betrayal unfolded, he tried to conjure up some answers.

The Earth?

Enslaving humanity?

Or the Klaxxosaurs...?

No. That time, he wasn't even close to the answer.

Now, coldly calculating like the commander he is, Hachi sees a scenario where they observed Papa from space until we discovered Star Entity in Klaxxosaur form, buried under Earth's crust. At the right time, such aliens presented themselves as... an omnipotent agent and promised to Papa the key to his desires. Lying to him all the way in, of course. Papa proceeded to plan to capture and build the ultimate weapon, and so he did for the vision of a free humanity. But as soon as his trust was placed into the aliens, they corrupted his values and, at the same time, guided him in a mad dash towards his 'bright future', while ultimately shifting that path to such future towards ruin and madness. Without him ever realizing.

Hachi concludes VIRM wanted Star Entity all along. Or bring down the planet with it, because if they didn't have it, they wouldn't want anyone else get it. A plausible scenario, in his mind.

"That's why they went such lengths to acquire Star Entity. It was too powerful to ignore."

Hachi's mouth bends slightly.

"Emotions are such a useless baggage."

Seconds after the beam reached the starships, the entire host of VIRM mechs on the ground immediately stopped moving and fell to the ground, like they were actually controlled drones. Hachi relived those moments as the last of the Klaxxosaurs fled in every direction like wild animals. For the first time in hours, the battlefield stood still. Even the sensors were silent, as everything that was even remotely over ground was melted by the sheer heat of Star Entity's beam. Maybe that was one of the reasons why the long-range antennas weren't functioning properly.

Hachi sighs as his eyes return to the timeline reaching the end...

"Wait, no. It's not even close to the end." He uses his fingers to drag the bar it to the end and... it stopped recording ten minutes ago, at the time that Hachi made the backup of the report.

Why...? Wasn't the battle over...? Hachi recoils and realizes that the meteorological drones were still up and recording. "Huh, did their sensors melt and started to record junk data?" Hachi scratches his chin looking down, but then his head reflexively shoots up as a quite obvious detail escaped him. "No, wait a moment. I've just seen through their cameras, they're completely operational. So, why is...?"

As like answering him back, the stern robotic reads aloud.

«Nuclear fallout cloud detected. Beta-gamma-neutron source detected.»

"Nucl... Nuclear fallout...?" As he fumbles his words, a holographic tooltip pops above the timeline.

 

TOUCH TO VISUALIZE IN VIRTUAL SPACE

 

 Hachi's hand promptly extends to the dialog and slides his fingers onto it. The timeline disappears and the room's lights slowly dim, until the surroundings are replaced with a virtual lattice-made model of Gran Crevasse and the jagged landscape of the mountain it was built upon. Above the complex expanding vertically, in an inverted cone shape, fogs a red cloud that slowly inches towards outer space.

«Mean energy of decaying particles calculated. Data models suggests a carbon-oxygen-nitrogen atomic fusion cycle took place close to near-orbit elevation. Units and active equipment in contact with fallout could be affected by the following conditions.

«Effect on communications: mild interference. Effect on electronic devices: terminal failure. Effect on inert elements: ionization and atomic decay. Effect on biological entities: lethal irradiation dose, followed by invalidating illness and life termination.

«Suggestion: emanate no-flight zone on the affected area.»

A pearl of sweat rolls down Hachi's temple as the robotic voice proceeds impassibly.

«Gravity fluctuations and wind models available. Descent of the radiated cloud in progress. Calculations suggest that the estimated area of maximum effect is 150 square kilometers around the area of operations.

«Long-term weather simulations shows 10% of the particles making touchdown in three hours, 30% in five hours and 100% in ten hours. Suggestion: declare immediate evacuation of every Plantation or friendly unit in a 50 km radius from the area of operations within seven to eight hours. All units should prepare for radioactive decontamination.»

Another sweat tear descends on Hachi's cheek.

«Attention: disregard of previous suggestion may lead to a successive 87% casualty rate.»

Then, another.

And another.

His hands start trembling. His breath chills and his throat contracts.

"It... can't... be," he utters in a whisper.

«Combining reports. The final survivability rate after twelve hours totals 0% of the deployed units.»

A cold shower washes over him. His back suddenly straightens like a pole and goose bumps  .

"It... can't... be..."

«End of report.»

The robotic voice remains silent after the ultimate judgment. In an infinite moment, the visualization of the room slowly fades and light crawls back onto the steel walls and onto the strategic command console.

"It... can't be true. Is it... wrong, right? What's the chance of that...?"

Silence.

"A-ahc-Command: d-dis-display..."

«Command unrecognized.»

Hachi clenches his fists and forcedly swallows down his own saliva, then insists.

"C-Command: confirm last report accuracy."

«Report probability: 99%.»

"Hah-No. That's not true. That can't be true. That just can't..."

Hachi hangs his mouth open mid-sentence, like his brain refused to complete it. The room's walls distort as if closing around him, and his chest is crushed like being at the center of the Earth. Looking at his trembling hands, sweat droplets fall onto his palms and his breath becomes painful to bear. Suddenly, he slaps both his cheeks to wake himself up from the shock.

"Why am I making all this mess? Why I am even talking to an AI in the first place? Am I going mad?"

After a slow, deep breath, he nods. A cloud of lethal radiation is about to touch down on the battlefield and kill anyone stranded there in mere hours from now. On top of everything, the aerial rescue teams are not reachable or unavailable and most useful equipment of Gran Crevasse has been cooked or isolated by Star Entity's awakening. The situation won't change even if he wishes it with all his being.

"So... it's..."

The end.

Unless...

"Command: disengage AI prism."

«Warning: transfer of system image into memory cylinder required. Proceed?»

"Proceed."

...he's faster than the wind.

 

* * *

 

 

The three mechs speed down the underground bright transport corridors of Gran Crevasse. With Argentea leading the group, turn after turn, through loading bays and depots, the group finally enters a wide, circular room with a large square platform at the center.

"We're at the elevator!" Zorome announces.

Tilting backwards to decelerate, Argentea, Chlorophytum and Genista come to a hovering halt above the center of the room, to then slowly descend and plant their boots on the ground. The trio looks around and find the room as they previously left it, a royal mess. To the side, a giant entry hole, from which they managed to reach their commander, and two metal carcasses of impaled VIRM soldiers, left abandoned against the wall with their torso opened up by extensive gashes and bullet holes as they tried to stalk the mech group from the battlefield. To the side, a series of doors are lined up against the walls in an inset corridor.

"Squad, keep watch." Miku orders. Genista nods and wields her gunlance revolver to her hip, supporting it with the carry handle, then proceeds to stay on guard towards the hole with an unnecessarily serious but cute expression. Chlorophytum, instead, retracts her hand inside the gauntlet and a set of sights appears on its top, then proceeds to glare with her only eye the direction they came from.

Argentea closes to the set of doors, then proceeds to squad on all fours in front of them. "Hachiii! We're here!" Miku announces herself, then proceeds to plant Argentea's cheek onto the steel floor before pointing her index finger to the central door of the bunch. "Would you open?" she asks while trying to trigger its photocell, but the door opens before she could find out. A serious Hachi, carrying a transparent cube-case wide as like as his arm in one hand and a cylinder in the other, greets her with a nod.

"Greetings, Squad 13. You're a bit late."

"Here we are, Hachi!" Miku chirps as a wide smile paints all across Argentea while she retracts her hand to the side.

 "Now, open your faceplate."

"...Huh? Why-"

"Don't ask, just do it," Hachi quells her firmly.

"Ah... Yes...!" Argentea's smile crumbles a little, then she proceeds to squint her eyes and to clench her mouth. "Unnf..." she pouts. Her front face suddenly switches off like an LCD screen, disengages from the rest of the head and reclines forward to stop parallel to the floor, acting as a step platform for the entrance of Argentea's cockpit.

"Oww, this feels like my face is melting..." Miku protests, but Hachi athletically jumps on the meter-high platform like it was nothing and proceeds to quickly clear the cockpit's rectangular entrance. Inside, he finds a red-headed girl with twintails on all-fours abandoned onto a bed-like supporting structure with her hands and legs lodged firmly inside cylindrical holes. She's wearing a white, skin-tight white jumpsuit with pink features, wearing a bulky and white collar with pink internal comfort cushions from which extends a spinal exoskeleton extending to her belt, made to relieve her tiny frame from posture strain.  Her head hangs abandoned, almost lifeless, even when Hachi enters the cockpit. To the other hand, a lively and scrawny kid half of Hachi's age meets him with a smile.

"Greetings, Hachi!" Sitting on the stamen seat with slightly curly, side-parted medium brown hair with a small cowlick on top, in the stamen blue jumpsuit with a solid breastplate, he happily addresses his superior, "Say, why are you here inside the cockpit?"

"I need transport," he plainly states.

"Awaw! What's inside my head??" Miku whelps.

"Me." Hachi goes proceeds straight to the left of the stamen seat. "This is the emergency transportation protocol. You'll find yourself confused for a moment, it's normal."

"Confused? More like my brain being stirred!"

"You'll get used to it shortly." Hachi places down the cubic briefcase besides Zorome and squats before it. The transparent briefcase glints briefly and captures the young parasite's attention that leans forward to get a good look at it. Inside, a pyramid the side of a hand, held by steel rods in place, faintly glows orange through the slightly blackened glass of the container.

"Whoa...!" Zorome marvels to such strange object, noting the contours were extremely well-crafted, almost like it's made out of perfection itself. Then, the boy shifts to his commander's profile while he's fiddling with his night blue cylinder in trying to plug it into the briefcase. There's something different in him from an hour ago, and he can't place the finger on it.  Zorome blinks repeatedly while trying to decipher his expression to no avail. "H-Hachi, is there... something..."

As he tries to ask, Hachi coldly glances toward him, "We don't have time right now. Code 390, close the hatch and start getting out the VIRM corpses out from the elevator platform. We need to resurface right this instant."

"Yessir!" The front face Argentea closes back shut and the panoramic screen comes online again. "You've heard Hachi, guys, let's get a move on!"

Chlorophytum and Genista nod to her, then all move in closer to the VIRM soldiers' corpses to grab one by one by each side and throw them back inside the explosion hole in the wall. After doing so, they return onto the platform.

"Command: show elevator controls." Hachi orders while sitting down onto the little space he has available between the panoramic screen and the stamen's seat and, under Zorome's surprised expression, a cold and robotic voice announces back «Host's primary systems connected, activating remote control interface,» while the prism behind the glass suitcase lights up considerably. Following the announcement, a holographic slab appears hovering in front of the sitting Commander with two big arrows on it. Hachi pushes the upwards one, and a round door on the ceiling above the platform parts open revealing an ascent tunnel black as pitch. Everyone looks up, then gulps down in unison.

The platform suddenly parts with the floor and, taken by surprise, the three mechs yelp as they are abruptly propelled upwards.

«Travel time: 200 seconds.» The cube announces, and the tunnel's lights turn on and flash intermittently as the platform quickly ascends towards the surface, some bright, some others eerily flickering.

"I-Is it safe to go this fast??" Ikuno blurts out while a rendered image of Chlorophytum in front of a white background yells with a bright teal eye.

"Yes, it's required," Hachi cryptically answers, then after a while, he further clarifies. "We need the rescue teams' support as fast as possible." Chlorophytum angles her mouth dissatisfied from the explanation but accepts it regardless.

Silence falls between the three mechs. Looking up the endless chasm, the trio admires effect of the dim service lights lined up orderly on the shaft's walls descending towards them like falling stars from the infinite black sky. Zorome secretly glances at Hachi noticing his seriousness while keeping watch to the altimeter integrated into the slab rapidly reaching the surface level.  His feet nervously jumps up and down.

"Hachi, how deep is this elevator?"

"Five kilometers."

"Whoaaa! Really? I thought we jumped down some other elevators, but five kilometers!... Cool!"

"Hm. Star Entity's broader side is eight kilometers long."

"W-Whooooa!"

As soon that silence falls again, an image of Genista appears onto a holoscreen to the side of Zorome. While her image timidly fiddles, the voice of Kokoro reaches Argentea's cockpit. "Hachi... where Hiro and Zero Tw- ah! I meant Code 016 and Code 002 -go with Star Entity?"

Hachi looks to her, then shakes his head. "Unknown. The radio installation at Gran Crevasse is broken, and even if it isn't, it can't reach orbital range anyways."

"O-orbital range??" Kokoro almost shouts from the surprise, under the "Haaaah??" of the entire team listening on open communications.

"Yes. They left Earth's surface as soon as they regained control of the weapon."

"Whoa..." Mitsuru exhales while Futoshi lightly hollers in dismay. "That's a problem!"

"Do... you mean when those earthquakes struck?" Kokoro asks further.

"Yes. The sooner we get to Bird's Nest, the faster I will be able to get in touch with... them..." Hachi's words come to a halt as he covers his mouth while realizing something. "Wait. Did... they... do it?" he asks to himself by his teeth.

Silence falls. Genista stares confused at an immobile Hachi pinching his chin and blinking a little too fast for his usual neutral and collected poise. Everyone listens to his silence open-mouthed, on the edge of his lips, but when nothing comes from them, Kokoro nudges in the begging question.

"...Do what?"

Hachi suddenly shakes his head and imperceptibly waves his hand. "...Nevermind. I had a... pervasive thought."

"Don't worry, Hachi, we're up for the task! We're going to zoom to the Nest like pros!" Zorome fists jolt upwards, ready to anything, but Hachi looks plainly at him and just nods, then diverts his gaze back to the slab of the upward-ticking altimeter. The boy sighs with a vaguely sour look before returning to gaze upwards, to the invisible other end of the elevator.

A pause, then Hachi chimes in. "We're sixty seconds to the top.  Your orders are to avoid any eventual contact if possible and enter flight mode immediately," he states his orders in formal fashion while ticking away at another holographic screen with a map depicted on it. "From there, turn four o'clock and veer north-east. The complex is some minutes at full speed crow's flight from the high-mass elevator." His face finally parts from the screen while addressing the team. "Everyone, I'm not sure what still lurks in the battlefield, so make sure to prepare for every scenario. Ready your weapons. Engage only if attacked."

"Yessir!" The three mechs respond in unison.

 Genista opens the revolver magazine on her gunlance and yanks out three spent orange cartridges, that fall to the floor with a soundly bang, and proceeds to reload taking out new shells from under her armored poncho. With a «Clack!» Genista flicks the magazine of her gunlance closed and brings its gun barrel upwards.

"Ready!" Kokoro shouts.

At the same time, Chlorophytum instead retracts both hands inside her gauntlets and ejects, from a side port, the magazine of her arm-fitted twin machineguns, then simultaneously reloads them both in a single motion from the magazine holder magnetically hovering over her belt . Her gauntlets' outlines paint bright violet as she brings her guns up.

"Guns are live." Ikuno announces.

 Finally, Argentea detaches her gloves from her hip armor, juggles them in the air and lets them fall onto her hands in a perfect fit. She clasp onto their internal grip and their long orange claws release forward, glowing brightly and acutely fizzling while immersed in the damp air of the elevator.

"It's showtime~!" Miku sings.

"Perfect." Hachi asks to the boys at the controls, "Stamens?"

"All clear," Mitsuru states.

"Focused!" Futoshi yells.

"On fire!" Zorome growls.

As the mechs look to each other, Hachi chimes in. "Remember, no slowdowns."

The three nod in unison, then look upwards.

A faint ring of light can be seen at the end of the shaft, slowly becoming bigger and bigger as the elevator zips upwards at high speed. Hachi dials the climb speed down, then presses a button onto the elevator controls. A blade of light can be seen forming to the center of the light ring and slowly getting bigger.

Then, the unexpected happens.

A garbled blue mess of a serpent Klaxxosaur falls through the opening shaft and freefalls towards the climbing platform. The moment literally freezes over as the trio realizes the absolute horror of their situation.

"KLAXXOSAAAUR!!" Futoshi yells at the top of her lungs.

"FIRING!!" Kokoro yells in panic while Genista shoulders her gunlance vertical. The other two realize in a panic what Genista's about to do and cower immediately.

«BOOM!»

The gunlance's barrel shocks the air and fires a molten round upwards. The elevator abruptly stops, pinned down by Rook Sparrow's massive recoil as Genista dents the platform with her boots.

"AAAAAAAAH!" Miku and Ikuno shout at the same time while Argentea and Chlorophytum are propelled upwards while conserving the climbing momentum. The round zips through the shaft painting a yellow tracer and impacts the falling Klaxxo with a violent explosion that expands the metal walls of the wide elevator shaft like a balloon. The shockwave compresses back down the two mechs onto the elevator platform that abruptly jams among deafening metal crackling noises.

Hachi, shoved aside from the shock with the cubed suitcase held just in time in his arms, regains his bearings and gets to the elevator controls, now painted red with an eerie caption all over it.

 

WARNING

ELEVATOR CRITICAL FAILURE

 

Above, Hachi grits his teeth at the Klaxxosaur plunging from the explosion's dust towards them, now with a hole at the center where Genista's round exploded.

"Elevator's busted!"

The monster's gonna crush the platform with all of them on top.

There's five kilometers' worth of fall beneath them.

And there's just one direction to go.

"EVERYONE, FLY MODE, GO, GO, GO!" Hachi screams.

"YESSIR!" A completely aghast Zorome shouts back to him.

"Ikuno! We've gotta fly!" Futoshi hails to his pistil.

"Ugh!" Ikuno winces in pain as Chlorophytum's shoulder pads open in two and two nozzles appear from them. Argentea's back armor opens and a jetpack, like Genista's poncho. The nozzles prime up, and from each one, an orange jet of plasma melts the platform beneath them.

"Liftoff!"

The propulsors explode and the trio launches upwards with a bang.

Argentea takes the lead after Genista, using her claws to cut in midair the pieces of the Klaxxosaur body that fall dangerously towards them. Chlorophytum, using her wings as reaction surfaces, twirls to the side and makes her twin machineguns sings while vomiting hails of bullets to help the former in smashing apart the incoming debris.

"GOOOOO!" Miku shouts, and the robots nail the hole in the serpent Klaxxosaur like a thread in a needle, continuing in their race towards the top. Argentea looks behind and, past his rocketing teammates, sees the monster loudly crashing onto the elevator platform to then disappear into the black of the depths of the earth. Argentea sighs in relief, then looks up and her expression immediately sours. The top is farther than they had imagined. The climb is certainly faster than before, but there's a lot of way to go.

"Please, let us make it... please let us make it..." Zorome starts praying from the fear. He glances to the side and finds an Hachi looking up with determined, peeled eyes and gritting hard his teeth. As if motivated by the energy of his commander, he takes courage and proceeds to do the same while burning through the way to the top.

"I'm... being... drained...!" Ikuno yelps.

"Ikuno, don't give up!! We're almost there!" Futoshi thunders with his voice trying to inspire her partner. The bright circle rapidly enlarges, but the ascent seem endless and the expression of each FranXX morphs in fatigue.

"Huhhh..."

Suddenly, the jets of plasma from Chlorophytum thrusters chokes intermittently, then suddenly switches off.

"I'm...! My wings! I'm low on fuel! Help me, HELP!!" Ikuno panics while her mech extends her hand towards the now visible blue sky, like trying to grab it. Argentea dismayingly witnesses her teammate, slowly decelerating her climb while tethered by gravity, and a furiously determined grin paints her faceplate.

"NO ONE LEFT BEHIND!!" Miku and Zorome scream in unison. Argentea switches her thruster off, orients herself downwards, then re-engages them. Hachi enters in panic at that maneuver and lies on the verge of firing a counter-order, but the absolutely dead-serious and unstoppable expression of Zorome steals from him all the words he had.

Argentea propels downwards and, as Chlorophytum runs out of momentum, embraces her teammate from behind.

"UOOOOAAAAAA!!" Both Miku and Zorome yell out of their lungs in sync and their jetpack's nozzles literally explode with plasma of unbridled violence, propelling them both up the shaft like a rocket. "UUUUUUP!!"

The climb is ludicrously fast and the round window to the sky widens dramatically. In no time, the two reach the top and are met by an incredibly bright sun.

"YES!" Zorome cheers, but he realizes that he talked too soon when Argentea's own thrusters suddenly shut off.

Zorome and Argentea's smiles instantly wipes off their face.

"Ah..."

As having just cleared the border of the ledge, Argentea and Chlorophytum once again plunge towards the bottom, one in the arms of the other.

Zorome, taken hold by shock, extends Argentea's arm to the sky.

And Genista catches it with her hand.

"HOOOOLD!!" Kokoro desperately yells to herself, as Genista leverages with her boots on the metal border of the chasm. Argentea takes hold of her hand, and she and Chlorophytum smash onto the circular walls of the hole, to then wildly dangle just above the nothingness. "UHHHGGG!!"

Genista's footing is slowly giving in, as her weight combined to the other two is constantly deforming the metal ledge where the black mech is standing, trying to halt his teammates' fall.

"GRAB THE LEDGE!!" Mitsuru yells to them.

Chlorophytum, on her teammate's plea, retracts her twin cannons and, jumps from the back of the pink striped mech to reach the ledge herself. She grabs the lid, and with a growl, manages to pull herself over it. "Ughhhh!" Ikuno rolls to the ground and remains lying on her side, feeling the heart of her mech.

 Meanwhile, Argentea proceeds to smash her other glove's claws onto the wall like a climbing pickaxe and scales the vertical wall aided by Genista. Eventually, her striped leg clears the rim and pulls her body over the solid ground, that rolls supine to the side of the chasm. Then, her faceplate dims out.

"Haahh... Haahh..." Inside Argentea, Zorome releases in panic her partner's controls and tries covers his mouth with his trembling hands, as like trying to quell his erratic breathing while his body is chocked-full of adrenaline. Miku, the twin-tailed redhead just in front of him, awakes in the same predicament and pulls herself upright to breathe better and calm herself. Their scared eyes glance at the same time in Hachi's direction, finding him still holding onto the cube, silently staring into the air in front of him.

"I-I'm sorry..." Zorome whispers at the verge of tears with a tone full of regret. "I-I'm..."

Hachi's serious but unresponsive stare slowly wakes with a rapid series of blinks, then slowly pans his view to the two parasites. His mouth moves without a sound as he stares blankly at the two. Both can't sustain eye contact and deviate their eyes downwards in shame.

"...Reconnect," he whispers.

Slowly but inevitably, the two return to their driving positions. Zorome grabs both control handles coming from Miku's exoskeleton. "R-ready...?" he asks and, after Miku nods, presses both buttons on each one and Miku's mind connects to him and both regain the control of Argentea, whose faceplate lifts with a sad expression. She scans to the side and finds Genista towering over her, keeping watch with her rifle on the ready, while both her and Chlorophytum were passed out on the floor.

The pink mech nods, but a «Bang!» is heard to his side. Chlorophytum just smashed her fist onto the floor, her eye glowing red. "Damn this body...!" Ikuno curses as her mouth morphs in rage.

"Ikuno..." Futoshi's worried voice resounds.

She realizes her outburst, "I'm sorry about everything. If I wouldn't be like this..." goes on blaming herself.

"We were almost out of fuel...!" Futoshi refers to the cutoff of the thrusters integrated in the FranXX to avoid expiring the fuel altogether, but she remains in denial. Convinced of Ikuno's innocence, Futoshi takes it a step further. "...there's absolutely nothing wrong with you, Ikuno!"

"L-Liar..." Chlorophytum wraps her arm around her body, sliding onto the ground on her flank. Her only eye narrows, but slowly dims and turns violet, then fades to a droopy teal. She realizes her behavior and looks at the others slightly embarrassed. "Sorry..."

Argentea gets on her feet and proceeds to close to her teammate and arc an arm around her to help her stand. pushing her body against hers. "It's OK, Ikuno! We've made it together! This is what counts!" Miku cheers her up.

"A-AH-!" Chlorophytum grabs her vigorously blushing faceplate under Argentea's curious reaction.

"Sorry to interrupt your moans, but did you realize where we are?" Mitsuru snarkily remarks.

"Huh...?" Miku parts from Chlorophytum and looks around. Past a veil of white fog and a dim light filtering from a dust veil between her and the sun, the surroundings are all blue-colored. Why...?

A pair of eyes was looking at her.

"AAAAGH!" Miku yelps. "Klaxxosaurs!"

"Dead ones. Everywhere."

"Hah??"

She was looking at a Lehmann Class carcass, straight in the eyes. A giant hulking salamander shaped Klaxxosaur, looking her way. No, not really. The corpse was angled in such a way that seemed it was eyeballing her to see if she was prey. But life wasn't beating inside those eyes, not anymore. Instead, its giant figure lies on the side with the belly torn open by a brutal gash and with torn cybernetic tubes coming out from it like entrails gored by a thick, blue substance. Its 'blood'.

"Oh-" Argentea looks around some more and, past the humid fog scattered by the sandy wind that's gently blowing around them, finds another one. Then another three. Then, an entire sea of giant blue carcasses, spanning in every direction, as far as her eyes go. "-Oh no..."

Above them, the silhouette of the Gran Crevasse complex. A collapsed domed structure surrounded by three tall series of high blue walls greet them in the distance. Around it are raising tall plasma casters that were shot down during the battle, some still fuming from their melted holes. They resemble the build style of the klaxxosaurs, with blue details and tubes, drawing their rectangular shadows upon the endless sea of carcasses.

"It's... strange. Those gigantic Klaxxo guns were all hidden around the complex under the surface of the earth. I thought we conquered Gran Crevasse, but... I guess we never fully did." Hachi comments. "Now, we need to move. And quick, too. Don't stop for anything, if we hesitate, we will completely run out of fuel."

"Yessir!"

The group engages hover mode and crawls towards the general direction of the Nest, guided by their FranXX's navigation interface. Without it, it wouldn't be possible to navigate by eye in what devolved into a mass open-field graveyard. Klaxxosaurs of every shape and form clutter the scantly veiled horizon dimmed by the sand cloud, large mounds of smaller bug-shaped ones are outlining in the waves of silver fog that paint their surroundings, and every so often, a hulking defeated giant makes his forlorn appearance, sleeping deeply onto the fractured, sandy earth. Dotting the landscape, groups of deactivated violet VIRM soldiers lay unscratched between the lifeless klaxxosaurs' husks, like waiting to suddenly regain life and spring up an ambush. The trio is visibly nervous due to the eeriness of the atmosphere, so they stop at every strange noise and creak only to reveal it was nothing noteworthy.

"Klaxxo forces retreated far back into the Earth's mantle and the VIRM soldiers just... disconnected when their orbital controllers were wiped. I think we're safe," Hachi tells the team, trying to calm their nerves. "Move towards north-east and enter the valley on the next waypoint."

On their way out, the team quickly finds a path through the battlefield and eventually come to a wide clearing made of earthen sand, rocks and sparse brownish vegetation, surrounded by barren mountains, where the fog is less prominent. Given the 'checkpoint reached' signal by the navigation interface, another waypoint appears north next to the entrance of a mountain valley traversed by a dry riverbed. The three speed through the valley at high speed, proceeding northwards.

 

* * *

 

 

After fifty kilometers of distance traveled in barely half an hour, thanks to the high land speed of the hover mode, the team reaches the end of the river valley that opens up west in a desolate plain to the lost eye. After stopping the hover mode to get their bearings, Argentea and Chlorophytum fall to their knees without breath.

"I-I'm... tired..." Miku laments while panting.

"It's because you're almost out of fuel. Never happened?" Hachi asks her while inspecting the tactical holomap on his cube.

"Y-Yes, but..."

"Look!" Genista points a red and white... curved talon just past the mountains to their east.

"That's our destination," Hachi announces. "Get onto those rock formations on our right. I'm going to dial to the ground control from there."

The group rockets up the mountain crest. Upon reaching the top, a spectacle reveals to them.

"Whaaaaaaa...!"

"Wow..."

"Magnificent."

"Cool!"

Surrounded by the mountain range in the distance, a solitary, yellow and brown grassy plain where, like a sapphire encased on a golden crown, a round lake shimmers by the morning rays of light. Pure, blue water washing against a golden beach bordered by a flat and low savanna grass field that indicated that the lake was bigger in the past and shrunk over time, but nonetheless a majestic size to behold. At the center of the lake rises a stark-white tower shaped like an abstract bird, that curves over a cylindrical, massive white building dotted by tiny rectangular windows and hollowed out at the center like a donut, where are embedded three giant white spheres dotted by skylights. Four very long pear-white bridges connect the sandy beach with the base's entrances and wings made of metal surround the structure as protection give off the reason why it was called Bird Nest: three eggs nursed jealously by their parent.

The three FranXX plop down onto the rocks to give the panorama a good, long-drawn look. Hachi, in the meantime, operates the cube silently in order to dial through his request to the support team, using Argentea's antennas to dial through the support base in an airstrip placed the other end from the base.

"Finally. Signal's five by five." Hachi presses the send button, and a confirmation entry pops up.

 

Battlefield status uploaded to high command

MedEvac request order received

Awaiting confirmation...

 

A loading wheel appears beside on the last entry, waiting for a response from the support command. Meanwhile, Argentea spots a control tower west of the lake, build on top of a salt flat. Besides it, some kilometers away, a series of hangars aligned with a long airstrip with two runways and service depots. Her eyes stare at the top of the tower, then wander off to the hangars, trying to catch the silhouettes of the crew focused in preparing the planes for takeoff.

"Hachi, why there's no one there?" Zorome asks.

"Hmm?" Hachi mumbles, still intently staring the holoscreen's rotating wheel.

"Are those buildings the Support Center? It's so deserted here, where are the people?"

"People...?" Hachi glances half distracted to the general direction of the runaway. He gets up standing from the cockpit's floor and realizes through the panoramic screen vision that there's no living soul whatsoever on the strip. No ground crew, no security, no air transports taxiing towards the launch queue, no vehicles scrambling to load up the drones, no medical units, nothing at all. His gaze passes over the deserted runaway, and his eyes start to blink in confusion.

"Why? W-wh... I... am..." Hachi grinds to a halt. Processing what he saw with his thin eyes suddenly widening, he continues among stutters, "N-no, can't be. They must be... that the...the support units must be in the airstrip to the north... must be. D-Definitely-"

"Huh?" Zorome remains stunned at Hachi's sudden change of tone. "North?"

"Y-yes. Maybe I wasn't... informed of it... I guess it's too dangerous to scramble here, since the strip it's not guarded by any forces whatsoever... But the support request will be delivered regardless..." the commander pans to the holoscreen displaying the same loading wheel from before still stuck in waiting animation, unchanged since a minute ago.

"YAAAWN!" Genista does the same, "Oh, s-sorry...! I'm tired too now!"

"Don't tell me Kokoro, I'm about to pass out here..." Ikuno complains with a funerary tone. "Good that we're safe now, but I'd like some of that fuel you were talking about, Hachi..."

He suddenly resumes from his petrified state and turns to Chlorophytum, "E-Ehm... yes. We... we should go on and return to the hangars. There should be loads of fuel tanks lined up for use."

"Hawwwwkey..." Miku responds midway a yawn.

The three robots zip down the rocky hill and descend the flat basin in front of them, then hover onto the glittering water surface raising tall jets of water from below their thrusters towards the white Nest. Proceeding parallel to the long, white bridge leading to the front of the complex, the white building grows considerably to the eye's notice and reveals itself at least triple the height of a standard FranXX and with the internal donut approximately a kilometer of diameter. Slowly, the windows on the walls enlarge as the group closes into the front of the complex.

"This is humongous... I didn't notice that it was like this before." Ikuno comments.

"Yeah, we left before dawn, sure looks big now." Futoshi observes.

"...Where was the door?" Kokoro timidly asks.

At that question, Hachi summons from his cube another holoscreen and pushes a button onto it. In front of them, left to the white bridge, two squared black outlines appears onto the white building's wall and, after a hydraulic discharge, part in two doors. A white platform extends from the bottom and plunges into the water posing as an access ramp.

Climbing the entrance, Argentea and Genista peek from each side of the door and see a long, bright corridor expanding both ways, wide as much as two FranXX's worth.

"Helloooo?" Kokoro exclaims with her external speakers. The sound echoes all around, then comes back the opposite direction of the corridor. "HUH?" Distraught, she looks around for the trace of any living soul, but no one was waiting for them to return. "Oww..."

"Huuuh? Where's everyone?" Argentea steps inside. In front of her, empty FranXX retention cages were lined on the opposite wall, surrounded by folding catwalks and a long glass overhang on the wall over them. Magnetic railings are placed on the ceiling, from which hang steel robotic arms used for cargo transport. But still, no technicians or security in sight. She walks over the center and pivots to get a good look around her. "Helloooo?"

Neatly lined against the wall from which they were peeking from, racks full of FranXX standard magma lances, black helmets, spare body parts and stacks over stacks of skeletonized rectangular crates, made with hollow steel bars wedged in a lattice cube shape. At their center, orange-glowing sphere-like tanks with two handlebars and a protruding cylinder with a display on it.

"For now, we can proceed to refuel autonomously. Those dispensers in the skeletonized crates," Hachi points at one of the many cubes orderly lined up on stacks reaching the ceiling, "contain magma fuel and a pumping system for injection. Pick one up."

"Yessir!" Zorome acknowledges, and Argentea proceeds to grab the closest solitary one by its structure. Meanwhile, Genista and Chlorophytum get closer to her, witnessing in silence what their teammate was doing.

"Now, break it apart and collect the tank. Be careful to not drop it."

"Y-yes!" Argentea takes in her hands one steel tube in each hand and yanks them apart to release its content from the containing structure. After grabbing its handle, Argentea lifts it up and shakes it to check out the bright orange liquid inside, shining through the partially see-through material.  "Wow..."

"Now, one of you. Turn around." Hachi orders Chlorophytum and Genista.

 Chlorophytum and Argentea exchange an awkward look, "E-ehm... C-can I? I'm about to pass out..." Chlorophytum raises her hand.

"S-sure..." the violet mech blushes a little, then turns around to face away from Argentea.

"Now, Argentea, there must be a magma transfer port on the back. Press it."

After making a weirded-out expression, Argentea observes her teammate's behind. No access port whatsoever.

"Where is it...? I can't see it...! Hachi, are you sure-" Zorome questions.

"It's somewhere around there. You'll have to open it by touching it."

"Huuuh... Why- well, OK then!" He focuses and slowly slides Argentea's palms onto Chlorophytum's slender back to feel the lid of the access port. Chlorophytum jolts at her teammate's touch and turns vigorously red.

"Wh-what are you doing?? Uhhhg..." Ikuno moans as Chlorophytum winces in discomfort. "B-be gentler!"

"I'm as gentle as I can!" Zorome exclaims embarrassed.

"ZOROOOME!" Miku scolds his stamen.

"Geez!  I-I can't focus like this...! You're the one doing the touching!"

"Alrighty then!" Argentea grins and digs further her hands on Chlorophytum athletic flanks. The winged mech squats down to escape from her hardcore-fondling teammate while covering her completely reddened faceplate.

"Uhh!!" Ikuno yelps, while her mech shudders wildly and her teal eye starts to wobble.

"Don't! Come back up!" Miku calls her back and, making to follow her, sees a squared outline just behind her ammo belt. "Ah, wait! Here it is!" Argentea yanks down her magnetic belt in an attempt to reach the port, and the purple mech yelps in surprise at her friend's unwarranted undressing.

"N-Nooo!!" She wildly squeals as she's dragged to the ground while trying to get her belt upright, fighting Argentea's boldness that is given away by an absolutely sadistic mood painted on her face.

"Come oooon! It's just behind the beeelt!" Miku yells in a rapey tone with a streak of X's falling from the edge of her FranXX's mouth.

"Stop bullying Ikuno, you idiots!" Futoshi yells halfway between fluster and anger.

Hachi facepalms. This has gone very wrong very quickly. After an unmistakably annoyed grumble, he regains the reins of the situation with an inflexible tone. "Stop this immediately. We don't have time to play around, this is an emergency. Chlorophytum, stay still and let yourself be refueled. Argentea, stop that fooling around and open the port already."

"Awww... S-sorry..." Miku and Zorome apologize and Chlorophytum pouts at his commander's outrageous orders, but eventually Argentea reaches the access port by slightly pulling the ammo belt down. After touching it, the cover pops right out and reveals a female-type inlet. "Oh!"

"Now, take the magma tank and press the access button on the panel."

Argentea takes the tank and does so. A male-type nozzle comes out of the cylindrical doodad on the spherical tank and the pink mech pulls it out. An extendable tube twenty meters long and wide as much as her palm comes out from the cylinder.

"Good. Now, insert the nozzle into the inlet."

Chlorophytum widens dramatically her only eye. "Wai-"

"Alrighty!" Argentea yanks without ceremony the nozzle into Chlorophytum.

«FOMP!»

Chlorophytum instantly throws her head backwards in shock while her body freezes in place and falls on all fours. Her eye vibrates. "Ahh..."

"H-huh?" Miku bats her eyes slowly in "A-Are you OK...?"

"Ikuno! What's happening??" Futoshi yells, "Miku, what have you done??"

Hachi scratches his chin with a tiny, very tiny sliver of insecurity. "When you're ready, press the button again."

"Yessir." Argentea smile crumbles a little, then proceeds to press the button on the tank's interface. Its frame vibrates, and the glowing contents gets pumped through the tube into the nozzle into the violet mech.

"OH!" Ikuno shouts while Chlorophytum's mouth enlarges all the way open. Her body start twitching uncontrollably while her eye narrows from the top like she's in a state of deep trance. Slowly, the mech slides into her knees and lets out a soft moan while the magma fuel enters her. "Ohhhhhh, my," her mouth spasms wildly.

Argentea witnesses the scene with panicked eyes and a completely reddened out faceplate. "Ikuno! D-Did I made a mistake? How are you feeling?? Ikuno!?"

"G-g-goooood," the winged mech's sides of her mouth curl upwards in satisfaction, "I-I'm... f-f-feeling... e-extremely..." then morphs into a completely doped out expression, "...good." Her hands cross onto her bust and grab her flanks with the wings on her gauntlets spreading apart like fans.

"Ikuno... what... the..." Futoshi is flabbergasted and can't piece a single sentence together.

Genista's face flusters and she hides behind her long, bulky rifle to not get noticed from her. Argentea's aghast expression tells everything about her understanding of the situation... completely nothing.

"Ha-Ha-HA-HACHI WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING!!"

"..." Hachi blankly stares at the absolute rapture of her inferior, with a pearl of sweat on his forehead. "...I didn't expect this to happen." In that moment, he thought very badly of the Doctor about the way he designed the refueling system. What was he thinking about when he worked on that?? It's completely illogical to connect the pistil's reward area of the brain to the magma refueling inlet...!

"I'm... fine now." Chlorophytum closes her eye and hangs her head forward, then grabs the nozzle of the spent tank and slowly takes it out from herself, not without some more twitching. "Hmmm." She closes the access port and, with a long-drawn sigh, tilts head towards Argentea with a meek smile.

Her eye is now shining of an unusual bright green.

"Your turn now," she says with a sexy voice.

"EEECK!" Miku's figurative skin goes on end and scuttles back from her. Chlorophytum slowly stands on her spike feet, her dynamite body on end, walks graciously to the piles of crates to take confidently a tank out. She shows Argentea the golden sphere dangling it in front of her face with a wanting smile.

"Nononononono!!" Miku quickly turns around Argentea and tries to flee like a rabbit, but the violet predator bird jumps forward and catches her from behind, embracing her body-to-body with her wings enclosing both of them. "Where do you think you're going...?" Ikuno whispers to her ear, dangerously close to her faceplate.

"Ah! No! Ah!" Miku fumbles in panic.

"Don't worry, I know how it goes, it hurts only at first..."

Hachi is completely taken by surprise. Unable to process what's happening whatsoever, he stares at Chlorophytum's elated smile with countless sweat drops descending his face. Meanwhile, Futoshi is living the situation in first person from her FranXX's point of view and hangs his mouth open like a puffer fish. Ikuno readies her palm open, then...

«SMACK!»

...she spanks Argentea on her white metal butt.

The pink mech's body jolts, "OW! Chlorophytum...!" and her access port opens.

"Mmmhhh..." Ikuno's tongue passes on her smile's lips, then she presses the release button of the orange tank to extends the tube with and to bring the nozzle closer to Argentea's inlet.

"N-no, wait a moment! I'm not..."

"Don't worry, Miku, just relax. You're going to feel really good."

"Whahahahisisiaaah-" Zorome goes completely out of his mind and covers his eyes with one hand.

Slowly, Chlorophytum slides the nozzle into Argentea. She shudders violently in Chlorophytum's arms and her faceplate lights up elated in a sudden jolt, wildly surprised. "Owaaaa!?" She locks her scared stare with her teammate's, who beams to her a bedroom stare.

"Relax..." she whispers, turning on the pump of the tank.

The tank starts to vibrate, and the glowing orange liquid climbs the tube. As soon as the fuel enters the nozzle, she jolts once again in surprise, tightening every artificial muscle and widening her bespectacled eyes.

 "A-aaawwwwwww..." As soon as her mouth parts, her eyes lose focus and he body slumps into her captor's arms, knocked out from the trance-induced pleasure.

"Heh... Look at her," Ikuno sweetly whispers to her ear, "so vulnerable."

She caresses Argentea's slender flanks, while supporting her body. Time passes, and the orange fuel disappears onto the pink mech. When the tank empties from all its content, Argentea's eyes slowly regain life and start blinking, to then react with surprise to her awkward stance.

"W...what happened? I feel so... light..."

Ikuno softly chuckles. "Welcome back."

"Ow-!" She protests when Chlorophytum slowly extracts the nozzle from her port. "What happened...? Oh, wait, no, uh- UHHH??" She suddenly shudders violently and grabs her chest with both hands, collapsing on her knees."Mmmmmmmhhhh!!" Argentea loudly moans with a stream of X's descending from her eyes into her bright red cheeks, still in shock from a sudden surge of pleasure rocking her metal frame like an earthquake.

"Oh? It came later. Hm. I see." Chlorophytum comments after catching her fall once again.

"Uuuuuuhhhhh...Ikuno, you... meanie... N-never again..." She protests.

"Well, you did the same to me, sooo..." The unstoppable violet eagle, after helping the pink mech up on her feet, happily glances over to Genista. The black mech startles and nervously waves her hands.

"N-no thanks! I-I can do it myself!!" Kokoro forces out a smile while trying to remain as calm as possible in front of the violet apex predator stalking the big prey, but her mech's bright red faceplate gives her thoughts away.

"Chlorophytum, stand down immediately." Hachi interjects with a hard-ball order, scratching his head out. "Given this... reaction from the refueling procedure, before inserting the nozzle make sure to disconnect the recipient from Driving Mode before starting the whole process, so we don't incapacitate anyone. Let's not get this happen that again. Got it?"

"Yeees..." Genista and an Argentea with circling eyes acknowledge the order, except Ikuno, whose FranXX eye returns teal-colored and pouts a little from the order just received. "Hmpf... yessir."

"Good," Hachi states out loud, "that was wholly unusual."

Genista sits on her knees and searches for the inlet port on her lower back. "Ah, found it!" she opens it with a light pressure. She then disconnects herself from Genista, which faceplate powers down, deleting the black mech's big-eyed expression, and leaving a metal texture in its place. With the help of a weirded out Argentea, the nozzle is inserted in her teammate's mech and the pump is activated. With no issue whatsoever, the refueling goes smoothly and, most importantly, without unnecessary groping, twitching or inappropriate moans. At the end of the procedure, the faceplate of Genista relights and shows once again her cute stylized face.

"Oh! I feel fine now, the sleepiness is gone..." Kokoro announces while feeling the mind clarity mostly related with a long night's rest.

"Good!" Argentea shows her the thumbs up.

«THUD!»

Both mechs turn to the source of the daft sound and see Chlorophytum collapsed against the wall. In visible difficulty, she claws into the metal plates to support herself from falling down on the ground, since her legs are no longer able to support her.

"Ikuno, what happens! Ikuno!!" Futoshi yells.

"I don't... feel good... my head... is spinning..." Ikuno weakly wheezes as her mech's fingers slowly give in to gravity.

"You two, stabilize the mech." Hachi promptly commands the startled Genista and Argentea, who immediately hurry to narrowly catch their companion's shoulders before falling to the floor. After plopping her on the ground, they both dismayingly stare at her very dim teal eye and pained frown.

"Ikuno...!" Kokoro calls to her, but her reactions are slow and sluggish.

"Code 214, disconnect and proceed with Protocol 15. Use the supplies in your cockpit."

"YESSIR!" Futoshi replies, and Chlorophytum's faceplate dims out.

Argentea and Genista look to each other, then slowly let go of their teammate, now sitting upright against the wall. The Protocol Hachi called for Futoshi was the 'medical attention' procedure.

"Hahhhh..." Hachi lets out a loud sigh while rubbing his temples with his index fingers. "Apart for Chlorophytum, we're in a relatively good position." He then pans his view to the catwalks lined up on the retention cages and realizes that no one was watching. Normally, there should be at least the ground operations team and engineering team ready to serve the FranXX units. Why no one's there, even after all that commotion?

"First the airstrip's ground operations are missing, now the engineering team... Was there an 'Abandon base' protocol call I wasn't informed about...?" A forced sigh follows the cold silence after his words, "This is ridiculous. I'm the Commander in charge, I should have been informed beforehand," he says with a sliver of irritation.

"Yeah! Where's the people? Did they bail out after Papa ditched us?" Miku inquires.

Hachi doesn't respond, instead looks at his portable cube's interface.

 

MedEvac request order received

Awaiting confirmation...

 

"Why won't you..." he turns to a worried Zorome, "Argentea, drop me off on those catwalks over there," he asks pointing to the cages lined on the wall opposite of Chlorophytum.

"Yup!" Argentea stands up, proceeds to the FranXX support cages, tall as much as the robots themselves, and levels her head to the closest catwalk at its same height. "Hnggg...!" Miku concentrates, and the forward-facing plate of her head opens forward and hovers just above the steel structure. Hachi takes his cube luggage, disconnects the memory cylinder on its top and proceeds quickly towards the exit.

"Stand by, I'll be back in a second," he says as he clears the door. At Zorome's affirmative nod, he descends the folding steps on the back of the faceplate and jumps off, landing with a rattling metal noise onto the catwalk. Hachi turns back, and seeing the faceplate closing, he quickly walks towards the path past the FranXX retention cage that leads into a sliding, metal double door after a set of hanging stairs. After looking around inquisitively, he walks in front of the automatic door that promptly parts in two.

Hachi walks into the side of a very wide corridor, at least eight meters from wall to wall, spanning both directions at infinitum. He looks left and right and notices the slight inward curvature of the hallway, suggesting he was inside the central cylinder. High-tech cameras hang from poles fixed to the ceiling ever so often and, against the wall, wide LCD displays showing labeled arrows for directions and more sliding doors leading to the base's facilities. On the floor, blue and orange bands outline a steel dual-carriageway road, smeared with rubber marks from service vehicles' wheels.

"The systems are still on..."

He stays immobile for several seconds, trying to hear any noises echoing through the hallway. A repetitive sound far down to his right. A daft «thud» slowly and endlessly replaying. Hachi turns right and walks rapidly into a light run towards the source of that noise, that increases the more his steps resound the empty corridor, until he sees in the distance an automatic door similar to the one from which he had come through. It was opening and closing, blocked by something dark on the floor, making the «thud» noise as the door frame collided with it and parted again in an endless loop.

"What, someone dropped equipment on the floor..." As soon as Hachi comes closer, he manages to recognize the silhouette of the object. "Who would drop a boot on the fl-"

Hachi halts immediately on his tracks.

The boot belonged to a leg that peeks lifelessly from the room past the door.

His grip loosens and his cubic suitcase bangs on the floor and tilts to the side.

"A-ah..." He can't articulate speech as his bewildered breaths are suffocating him, but his legs start moving on their own. He runs towards the body and a surge of fire engulfs his chest and a thundering voice comes out from it, "SOMEONE IS INJURED HERE!" he shouts towards the other end of the corridor, trying to attract some attention on him and the person on the floor. As he gets close to him, he recognizes his uniform to be the one of the Guards, the military unit of APE. Black tactical boots onto black, wide cargo pants and a black hard-weave uniform with red inserts on the neckline. Over the uniform he's wearing an immaculate tactical rig and, on his head, a tactical helmet with a long ballistic mask without eye sockets. There's no blood in the vicinity... Did the soldier pass out?

Hachi presses the hold door button, squats next to him and places a finger onto his neck.

No pulse.

"What...? MAN DOWN! ANYBODY HERE?! MAN DOWN!" His shouting bounces off the walls of the corridor in an echo, but the call remains unheeded. Not hearing anyone back, he returns to the soldier and...

"Sniff..." Suddenly, Hachi's nostrils pick up the stench of burnt meat. He looks better on the soldier's face and notices a faint smile on it. He makes to slowly remove the soldier's helmet and the scalp in contact with it comes off from the skull like it was cooked. The stench worsens and Hachi stops midway while his mouth hangs open and trembles to the horrifying state of the soldier. Slowly, he resumes taking off the helmet revealing a horrifying spectacle: the skin above the soldier's temple was completely charred and his eyes exploded in a white goop from the heat. That happened while he was smiling.

"Oh... Papa..." Hachi's reaction is very mild, but despite his iron will his stomach flutters for a moment. The helmet has a brain computer interface that projects information and emotions directly into the brain. He never thought that the very powerful electrodes that are used to project the data past the skull could be overloaded like this.

"He's done for..." Confused, Hachi investigates the room the soldier came from, a locker room. As soon as he walks inside, an incredibly rotten burnt smell invades his nose and, past some lockers, four other corpses greet him, with the same tranquil and eerie smile of the previous one. They fell where they stood where they were cooked alive by the helmet.

 That's why no one was responding. Everyone suffered the same fate as the soldier at the door.

"Oh, no... no, no, no..."

He runs out of the room and runs down the corridor. He approaches another room close by and, as soon as he opens its door, a daft burnt smell and dead smiles greet him. At least ten people lie slumped on the floor with their brain cooked by their helmets. Next door, a security station. More soldiers found dead. Hachi backs off the room and places his back onto the steel wall of the corridor, in a desperate need of accepting what he saw.

That virtual helmet is an incredibly important headgear. Comes in many shapes and sizes depending on the role of the wearer and every Adult, tactical officer, engineer, worker and soldier must have it on 24/7 in order to being able to participate with the collectivity. The main use of the helmet is being able to see in full neural augmented reality and communicate thoughts to others without the need to speak. In fact, the use of the vocal cords is a 'barbaric' practice and only the Parasites, along with whoever regularly comes in contact with them, are exempted from that axiom. That's because they represent the 'old humanity' and they must not be influenced by the new one.

Hachi rewinds his memory and replays what Papa said at the time of his betrayal.

_There exists a form of pleasure that is gentle and perpetual, and you will now experience it._

Death.

Hachi's legs give in. His back slides on the wall and he ends sitting on the floor. He cups his hands onto his mouth.

"Papa... why? Why would you do that? Was it really necessary?" Hachi begs in a whisper, "Did you... really hated the human race this much?"

That's no coincidence. Those weren't helmet malfunctions. Everyone has been purposely killed and there's no doubt about it.

"...And now? I can't do anything by myself. How am I supposed to save them?"

No.

He's not dead like the others.

His heart is still beating furiously in his chest. He has still legs to run with, hands that can move and an unstoppable will to direct them, as it has always been. He will not abandon the people that looked up to him like Papa did. He will not make the same mistake as him. There must be a way to right all wrongs, and more importantly, there must be a way for everybody on the field to come home alive. Forget Papa, now his mission is to make this happen, no matter the cost.

Hachi jumps up standing and launches forward in a full run towards his cube and snatches the handle as he's passing close. His heavy footsteps stride back towards the FranXX retention area, where he left his team.

"Hachi! What's happening?" Miku asks him as Argentea meets him back with curious eyes and Genista turns towards him from watching the passed out Chlorophytum.

He's forced to do it. He must protect them.

"The base has been evacuated for a while," Hachi lies outright, "the support request will be taken care of eventually. But for now, we won't have any further assistance and we're going to make do with what we have."

"Ah..." Zorome reacts with dismay. "What... can we do?"

"Now that you're refueled, I need you, Argentea, to take several tanks with you and transport them to the battlefield, rescue Delphinium, explain them the situation and start recovering the injured FranXX crews left on the battlefield. Genista, I need you to take the supplies from the other crates around here and bring them to a landing zone I've already arranged. We need to get a hospital camp going as fast as possible to house the injured. I'll give you the coordinates as I get to the tactical command room."

"Yessir!" Both acknowledge, reassured from Hachi's confidence.

"That's all for now."

"Hm!" Miku smiles to him.

"Let's go!" Zorome yells.

"Yes...!" Kokoro agrees, "We'll be on our way," Mitsuru states.

"I will be keeping in contact shortly." Hachi nods to both of them. With apparent calm, he turns around and walks through the door. As soon as it closes behind him, he starts desperately running towards the top of the tower of Bird Nest.

"Failure is not accepted-!" Hachi incites himself.

 

* * *

**Chapter 2 - Battlefield - END**

* * *

 


End file.
